Henry Adams, ``grandson of one President and great-grandson of another,'' becomes a courageous sleuth in the hotels, streets, and tunnels of 19th-century Paris. It's 1892, and Adams, 54, is in France to research his book, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. It's also seven years since the suicide of his wife Clover, so that when Adams meets an American artist working at her easel in the fields near Mont-Saint-Michel, and when she reminds him of Clover, it's understandable he'll do some cathedral-seeing with her and, with her consent, call on her when both are back in Paris. At her Paris address, though, Adams is told that no Miriam Talbott is there or ever was; worse, he is summoned to the Paris morgue to identify her dead bodyexcept that the body isn't Miriam Talbott's. So begin four days of danger and intrigue that become steadily more intertwined with a vast bribery scandalinvolving the dismally failed French effort to build a Panama canalthat's about to topple the government. Missing one social engagement after another, Adams snoops and dashes about Paris on the trail of Miriam Talbott, indefatigably finding evidence of an enormous conspiracy, witnessing murders, fearing for Miriam's life, twice almost losing his own, and learning about the new concept of fingerprinting andeven moreabout the uses of photography in hunting crime. At end, mysteries will be solved, the government will have fallen, and Adams, patching up his tattered social affairs (including a could-have-been liaison with the wife of Senator Donald Cameron), will get back to his new book. He says to friend John Hay, ``If you want to understand what is happening around us today, you have to go back to the twelfth century and ask that question.'' A debut that offers intense intrigue; an intellectual hero who's pedigreed and real; and a Paris of its day vividly and expertly rendered. (First printing of 100,00; Book-of-the-Month selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-22943-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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