The limpid prose quickly persuades the reader to a trust not unlike Irina’s in Andrei—and like Andrei, Shapiro’s novel is at...
A Stanford freshman finds herself drawn into an Eastern European immigrant underworld in this erotically charged second novel from Shapiro (13, rue Thérèse, 2011).
Brought to America from a Romanian orphanage when she was 5, Irina has always felt isolated from her peers and her loving but clueless adoptive parents. Days after moving into her college dorm—where she’s already aware she will not fit in socially—she meets Andrei, who immediately recognizes her as a fellow Romanian. He's older, but she's drawn to his sinister sense of irony, potential for cruelty and occasional flashes of vulnerability. They become lovers, and she begins spending most of her time with him and his two associates, crude fellow Romanian Drago and former Russian soldier Vasilii, who at first seems more refined than the others. Although Andrei calls himself a capitalist entrepreneur, Irina knows the men’s enterprises, like a chop shop for stolen cars, are shady at best. She travels with the men to Las Vegas, where Vasilii marries the strikingly beautiful Elena, who has been sent to him from Russia. Life turns darker. The girls are made to attend a disturbing stage show that includes live sex. Drago informs Irina that he's offered Andrei $10,000 to fuck her. Andrei gives her a fake passport and bank account, then sends her to buy expensive clothing and jewelry she wears once—to make love with Andrei—before it disappears. Irina becomes increasingly aware that Vasilii is the one in charge and that perhaps he is a truly evil man. The story of Irina’s life with Andrei is interspersed with bits of Romanian history and the dark, twisted Romanian folk tales Andrei tells. Also scattered throughout are scenes from Irina’s future life as a lonely bank teller after Andrei casts her out of his world.
The limpid prose quickly persuades the reader to a trust not unlike Irina’s in Andrei—and like Andrei, Shapiro’s novel is at first enticing, then ambiguous and ultimately coldhearted.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-40536-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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