Think of it as ``War and Commerce.'' In this sprawling third installment in film director Kazan's story of Stavros Topouzoglou, following America America (1962) and The Anatolian (1982), rug merchant Stavros finds business opportunities in the 1919 Greek invasion of Anatolia and war with Turkey. Stavros, now middle-aged, returns to his Anatolian roots with his brother Michaelis as the Greek army is driving the Turks out of Smyrna, the first stage of a Greater Greece campaign. This ``creature of the bazaar'' knows now is the time to buy Turkish rugs cheap for export to New York. Traveling into the interior, buying nonstop, Stavros is also looking for a wife for his new home in Smyrna, and quirky, fearless Thomna seems to fit the bill. She wants a ticket to America, Stavros wants a good breeder; it will be a pragmatic union. But now Stavros behaves quite unpragmatically; ignoring news of Greek military reversals and his New York boss's order to shut down their operation, he continues dangerous purchasing missions behind enemy lines and a stormy on/off relationship with Thomna. As the patriot supersedes the businessman, so the war replaces Stavros's ambitions as the engine driving the novel. Increasingly Stavros becomes Kazan's cat's-paw, eavesdropping on King Constantine, running errands for the archbishop, as the Greek army collapses and the Turks, burning Smyrna, drive the Anatolians into the sea. The lonely figure at the end seems less a casualty of his own conflicts than a servant who has performed one too many narrative chores. Kazan's treatment of Greeks and Turks is evenhanded. He uses a broad canvas, including generals and hamals (Turkey's untouchables), while keeping the bourgeoisie in the foreground. Yet the faltering storyline and Stavros's loss of authority result in a work that, despite powerful set pieces, generates more heat than light.
Pub Date: May 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42565-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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