by Gerard Woodward ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2015
An erudite yet melancholy meditation on an artist’s life, Woodward’s tale, often a comedy of the absurd, is peopled by an...
Woodward (A Curious Earth, 2008, etc.) extracts black comedy from the bumbling life of Kenneth Brill, a young artist of confused sexuality.
All English wit and writerly turn of phrase—"a brow ploughed with parallel wrinkles," "little coy nymphs rising from fairy pools"—Woodward’s first-person narrative begins late in World War II as protagonist Brill relates his life to a military attorney, Davies, an archetypal upper-class twit. Groin-shot and invalided home after a misconstrued homosexual seduction—"his spittle was sweetness in my mouth"—Lt. Brill’s being court-martialed not for that, but for painting landscapes around his family home, Swan’s Rest; he's charged with encoding his paintings to inform the Nazis about a planned airfield. Brill’s father, a former vaudevillian, grew prosperous selling human waste sludge as fertilizer, but the government now "will brush us aside like human dust." Brill offers childhood memories, then moves on to his studies at the Slade School of Art. There, he ironically faints at the sight of a nude male model—"All my artistic life I had wanted nothing more than to tackle the human form"—and then is expelled for hiring prostitutes to pose. A Slade instructor, half-Italian, half-Spanish Arturo Somarco—a flamboyant, duplicitous character—attempts seduction. Somarco later helps a drunken and politically ignorant Brill dry out at Hillmead Farm, a Fascist hotbed. Meanwhile, April Card, once Brill’s fellow instructor at prestigious Berryman’s Academy, "by some semi-conscious manipulation of my deeper internal divisions " ends up pregnant, a state reached after farce-filled sexual misadventures that begin with birdwatching in flagrante delicto. Woodward’s settings—time and place—are artfully rendered in England and during Brill’s Camouflage Corp North African desert service.
An erudite yet melancholy meditation on an artist’s life, Woodward’s tale, often a comedy of the absurd, is peopled by an abundance of colorful characters.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-782-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Amor Towles ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2011
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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