Both lyrical and cleareyed, a rare and welcome combination.
Danticat’s first fiction in nine years (The Dew Breaker, 2004, etc.): a snapshot of 21st-century Haiti in the form of stories unfolding around a little girl in the coastal town of Ville Rose.
Claire’s mother died in childbirth, and on the evening of her seventh birthday in 2009, her father, Nozias, a poor fisherman, agrees to give her to Madame Gaëlle, an affluent fabric vendor whose own daughter died three years earlier in a traffic accident. Claire runs off to think things over, and the narrative circles back to chronicle Gaëlle’s pregnancy and the death of her husband in a random gang shooting. From there, we travel to Cité Pendue, a festering slum on the outskirts of Ville Rose, where Bernard Dorien’s tentative steps toward a better life are violently halted after he is accused of complicity in that shooting. The intricate, sometimes-intimate interconnections between rich and poor in a small town are evident in the story of Bernard’s friend Max Ardin Jr., son of the elite local private school’s arrogant proprietor, and Flore, the family’s maid, whom he raped and impregnated 10 years earlier. Flore gets her revenge by exposing his crime on the popular local radio program Di Mwen—Creole for “tell me.” (Danticat makes evocative use of Creole’s distinctive French/African cadences throughout, and the novel’s title translates her protagonist’s full Creole name, Claire Limyè Lanmè.) Louise George, host of Di Mwen, has her own reasons for humiliating the Ardins; motivations are never simple in Danticat’s nuanced presentation. Her prose has the shimmering simplicity of a folk tale and the same matter-of-fact acceptance of life’s cruelties and injustices. Yet, despite the unsparing depiction of a corrupt society in which the police are as brutal and criminal as gang members, there’s tremendous warmth in Danticat’s treatment of her characters, who are striving for human connection in a hard world.
Both lyrical and cleareyed, a rare and welcome combination.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-27179-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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