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THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD

An emotionally charged and beautifully constructed novella from the acclaimed Spanish author of City of Marvels (1988) and The Truth About the Savolta Case (1992). Initially set in the 1950s in a small town in the province of Barcelona, it's the story of Sister Consuela, a young nun recently appointed Mother Superior of her convent, which operates a charity hospital and hopes to establish an old people's home. During her several visits to the mountaintop home of Don Augusto AixelÖ, a wealthy landowner who had opposed Republican rebels throughout the country's civil war and thereafter prospered, the Sister finds herself tolerating, even enjoying the rakish urbanity of the nobleman from whom she seeks financial help, and eventually, to her mingled joy and despair, falling in love with him. Attempting to atone for her lapses, Sister Consuela is forcibly brought into the presence of Don Augusto's enemies, and even finds herself joining in a gun battle (``I don't know whether God is putting me to the test, or making fun of me''). Thirty years later, all passions spent, she learns of an ironic conjunction, despite their long separation, of her lover's fate with her own. And, in a moving conclusion worthy of Garc°a M†rquez at his most inspired, we learn exactly what Sister Consuela's past has meant to her and how it has changed—and might have further changed—her life. Mendoza infuses this spare, haunting tale with telling characterizations, vivid descriptions of storms and floods (which foreshadow and parallel the nun's disturbed emotions), and suggestive symbolism (the hulking presences of threatening guard dogs; Sister Consuela's misguided entry into a meat larder where freshly killed game hangs). A brilliantly orchestrated demonstration of the ambiguities of moral action and the variety and depth of human personality—and, not incidentally, a suspenseful and absorbing story as well. A gem.

Pub Date: April 14, 1996

ISBN: 1-86046-044-5

Page Count: 128

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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