Anyone with even the mildest interest in clothing will enjoy this knowledgeable, readable account of a pivotal year in haute...
A young woman from the French provinces watches Chanel reinvent high fashion in an enjoyable second novel from Diliberto (I Am Madame X, 2003, etc.).
In early 1919, orphaned Isabelle Varlet leaves her hometown of Agen and travels to Paris, armed with a letter of introduction to Chanel from a local dressmaker praising her skill with a needle. “When I started work at Chanel Modes et Coutures, I joined a revolution,” Isabelle says. Women are cutting their hair and showing their ankles; Chanel’s sleek, unstructured clothes have the simplicity and ease they want. Lovingly detailed descriptions of the painstaking draping, cutting and hand-sewing that goes into each couture creation are more interesting than Isabelle’s personal life, which involves a not-terribly-exciting romance with a one-legged war veteran and some ferocious passes by wolfish male couturiers. Happily, most of the plot centers on rivalries within and outside of the Chanel workshop. Isabelle rises quickly to the rank of première (head seamstress and virtually an associate designer), but her position is threatened by a jealous coworker and the theft of her group’s toiles (master patterns) just before the all-important August 1919 unveiling of the collection with which Chanel hopes to cement her reputation as France’s greatest fashion designer. By far the most vivid character is Mademoiselle, as her employees call Chanel: imperious, capricious, utterly dedicated to her art yet also a shrewd businesswoman, a proto-feminist who tells Isabelle, “work and independence are what keep women young and attractive.” Around her swarm jealous rivals like Jean Patou, scheming subordinates and impossible clients, whose every arbitrary demand she expects her overworked staff to fulfill. Isabelle is nowhere near as colorful, but she’s a good observer who holds back the dressing-room curtains so readers can enjoy an insider’s peek at this rarified world.
Anyone with even the mildest interest in clothing will enjoy this knowledgeable, readable account of a pivotal year in haute couture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8065-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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