A first English translation of an intense and disturbing short novel, originally published in 1928, by an obscure Moravian-born writer best known for his friendship with Franz Kafka and for his later novel The Eyewitness (1977). ``The Aristocrat'' is Boâtius von OrlamÅnde, who narrates in a nervous present tense the story of his unhappy years at Onderkuhle, a boarding school for scions of wealth and privilege who are destined to be respected and to command (``not to be courageous, but to show courage was what was demanded''). Boâtius, gloomily resentful over his separation from his family, grows separated also from the expectations of his class: He fears death (which he refers to as ``D.'') and broods over other boys' ascensions to courage and manliness, qualities he suspects he'll never possess. A kind of grudging celebrity attaches to him after he ``breaks'' a spirited stallion and after he appears to save a schoolmate from drowning. But Boâtius knows that he pushed the boy under water in the first place, and that his feeling for animals in fact evinces his displacement from what others call normality (``I love animals greatly, but something of this love is envy''). When (in 1913) Onderkuhle catches fire and burns to the ground, Boâtius's ``heroic'' sheen is also burned away. He returns to his native city, goes to work in a turbine factory, and only gradually reestablishes contact with his unloving mother and beloved father, settling contentedly into the anonymity and mediocrity he knows he was born for. Weiss eschews narrative logic, concentrating instead on sequences of images and ideas dictated by his troubled protagonist's moods. The book's best moments include superbly sensual, almost Lawrencian descriptions of animalsespecially horsesand such unforgettable pictures as that of Boâtius looking into a star-filled night sky, overpowered by a sense of his own smallness and mortality. Expertly translated minor-key work, and a welcome addition to the growing body of modern European fiction available in English.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-85242-262-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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