A well-played mystery for music lovers. Bravo!
On a weekend in 1993, the performance of Gustav Mahler’s brooding Ninth Symphony by a fictive Chicago Philharmonic frames this cleverly constructed murder mystery.
A prologue describes the 1963 murder of Eugenie Leloir, the young wife of Swiss rising star Auguste Leloir, who will conduct the Philharmonic in the Mahler Ninth that evening. Post-murder, the performance is cancelled and the case remains unsolved. Thirty years later, now–world-acclaimed Leloir returns to conduct the Mahler Ninth, but during the first performance the principal oboist collapses and dies, which sets off a convoluted chain of events, including a plot to murder Leloir. Details of reed preparation and the venues of Philharmonic Hall and greater Chicago suggest intimate knowledge of woodwinds and the various Chicagoland crime scenes. Dialogue is lively while the settings and musical details enrich the plot line, and orchestra members and Philharmonic staff are well drawn, especially Mallick, one of the security guards and a former police detective. In fact, Mallick, lazy and almost surly behind the reception desk, steals the show in his post-crime transformation into an inspired gumshoe. Leloir and the orchestra’s music director, Grant Alexander, aren’t as well-developed, however. It strains credulity that courtly Leloir would ignore his obligations as a guest conductor in order to join Mallick in search of clues in the oboist’s death. Leloir and Mallick are surely one of the oddest couples in crime fiction: Mallick left the police force in disgrace because of incompetence; Leloir actively dislikes him but accompanies him in the hope of learning more about his wife’s death. Grant Alexander’s plot to kill Leloir, whom he perceives as a threat to his career, becomes entangled in aspects of Eugenie’s murder that neither Leloir nor Mallick satisfactorily explains. Despite their odd coupling, Mallick and Leloir orchestrate the finale with the aplomb of Poirot at a pace more presto than adagio.
A well-played mystery for music lovers. Bravo!Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Giselle Stancic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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