Published widely in England though less known here, Josipovici (Contre-Jour, 1986) offers a fine little book that's imitative but often lovely indeed. Vacationing in Italy with his rather disagreeable girlfriend, a young Englishman meets a second woman, also vacationing, who's much more interesting than the first. Falling into conversation one day after the next—and even going on a day's hike with her—he bit by bit, with a measured gradualness worthy of Henry James, elicits the woman's story from her. It's a story, too, with the aura and subtlety of James: the woman's grandmother once, in the garden of a hotel in Siena, spent a day talking passionately with an unmarried young man whom she never saw again and whose entire family was later destroyed by the Nazis; the woman herself, years afterward, visits Siena for the purpose simply of finding and seeing that garden. Even after the story (that's all there is to it) is out in the open, its meaning may not be; meeting again with the woman back in England, the young Englishman still isn't sure what either the woman or the story means (``What's meaningful?'' she asks him at one point, in a perfect, hyper-Jamesian touch). Talking about it with friends (Rick and Francesca, a married couple) over dinner doesn't help much, and at story's end, as at its framed beginning, neither the young man nor the reader knows whether he'll call the woman again, whether he'll see her, or whether she wants him to. Familiar themes; Katherine Mansfield-esqe lucidities of domestic detail; dialogue and tone often of purest Hemingway (``I am trying, she said. It isn't easy. He was silent. I have to get ready for lunch, she said. Yes, he said''): it all adds up, in the skillful Josipovici's hands, to a brief, indisputably charming, single-evening's pleasure.
Pub Date: May 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-8112-1291-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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