A dentist and a prince—along with a remarkably articulate cat—navigate the complex politics of late-19th-century Romania.
It says something about the complexity of central European statecraft that the latest novel by Florian (Little Fingers, 2009, etc.) has a 10-page appendix explaining the Austro-Prussian War, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and other historical details relevant to the book’s setting. But though Bucharest endured plenty of turmoil between 1866 and 1881, this book concentrates on more intimate concerns. Central to the story are Karl, a Prussian lieutenant who’s been granted the throne of Romania, and his dentist, Joseph, a free spirit who quickly settles into an ad hoc German community in the new city. Florian writes in a fablelike style, and many of his observations deal with the unstable melting pot of the new world Karl and Joseph enter: Early on the dentist is bemused that he’s on “an Austro-Hungarian vessel, with a Czech captain, between the Romanian and Bulgarian banks of the Danube, both buffeted by winds from Istanbul.” So unlikely connections become a running theme in the novel, as Joseph falls for and later marries a nanny and Karl consorts with a blind prostitute. Florian’s style can be demanding: He writes dense, lengthy paragraphs that sometimes shift in and out of dream states, and dialogue is practically absent. Indeed, the closest the book gets to being conversational are the messages Joseph’s cat leaves on the furniture—they’re just scratches to mere mortals, but they turn out to be high-styled epistles praising human kindness. Such moments lighten the mood considerably, and would have been more welcome in the closing pages; as Bucharest destabilizes, the story becomes ploddingly descriptive about legislative and diplomatic parrying.
A genial tale about fate and romance that sometimes gets overly tangled in political history.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-38835-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
10
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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