Reserved storytelling damages a potentially riveting tale.
A disappointing saga of brothers in World War II Tokyo.
Tsukiyama (Dreaming Water, 2005, etc.) was perhaps aiming for a restrained grace in her narrative of two boys growing up amidst the destruction of war, but instead the novel offers little more than a listless chronology of Hiroshi and Kenji’s triumphs and sorrows. Beginning in 1939, the Japanese war in Asia has little impact on the young boys who live in a quiet district in Tokyo. As toddlers their parents died in a boating accident, and ever since the two have been raised, and doted upon, by their loving grandparents, Fumiko and Yoshio. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, life becomes gradually more miserable; there are blackouts, food shortages and the dangerous Kempeitai, a neighborhood association that serves as spy, extortionist and executioner to those under their jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the boys still have ambitions—older Hiroshi is to become a sumo wrestler and Kenji a mask maker for the Noh theater. Kenji and Hiroshi are lucky enough to survive the fire bombings that devastate Tokyo, but others are not so fortunate—namely Haru and Aki. The two young girls escape but watch their mother perish, an event that has long-lasting effects on both the girls and Hiroshi and Kenji. After the war Hiroshi becomes an apprentice sumotori (in the stable owned by Haru and Aki’s father) and Kenji goes to university to study architecture. As they become young men, they realize their dreams as Hiroshi climbs the professional ranks of sumo and Kenji gives up architecture for a quiet studio space to carve masks. They both marry (Hiroshi to the suicidal Aki) with tragic results, but through their support of each other, and the nurturing of loved ones, they recover some sense of well-being. Though Tsukiyama creates a vivid portrait of war-time Tokyo and the city’s rebuilding, the history overshadows the characters living it. Hiroshi and Kenji move through the years, yet there is little to draw the reader into their emotional lives.
Reserved storytelling damages a potentially riveting tale.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-27482-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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