A fine rendering of tormented souls.
An aging couple, survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, revisit Poland after a 40-year absence.
Edelman’s short second novel (War Story, 2001) unspools in telegraphic paragraphs signifying a journey both physical and spiritual for the two protagonists. Jascha, a celebrated author best known for a Holocaust novel, and his wife, Lilka, live in London and, against Jascha’s better judgment, are traveling by train back to Warsaw, where he has been invited to give a reading. Both are torn between their trepidation at returning to a homeland they last saw as escapees from the Warsaw ghetto—where they first met and became lovers—and their desire to recapture the luxury of prewar travel, complete with much consumption of chocolate, cigarettes, vodka, bread and butter. They find their train and the once-opulent Warsaw hotel they check into sadly faded. The reading audience reacts to Jascha’s novel with indignant defensiveness. As they continue to drink, smoke, make love and sleep, Jascha and Lilka confront memories of their existence in the ghetto, many long suppressed. They both benefitted from lucky connections that they later contemplate with guilt. Jascha, a resourceful smuggler, was the right-hand man of the Accountant, the ghetto’s corrupt kingpin, who engineered his escape to the “Other Side” (of the ghetto wall) with forged identity papers. Lilka escaped deportation, and the ghetto, through the intervention of her mother’s Nazi lover. Separated after the war, they encounter each other by chance in London when Lilka translates Jascha’s book. His sudden renown and intractable narcissism almost sever them again, but their marriage endures as a function of mutual fascination, shared history and shared secrets. Edelman skillfully reveals the characters’ deepest misgivings and regrets, as both realize they will never be at home in this world, except—and only sporadically—with each other.
A fine rendering of tormented souls.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2244-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.
When Chi Chi Donatelli gave famous crooner Saverio Armandonada a manicure on a 1930s New Jersey beach, little did she know that the swanky singer would change her life.
After his childhood sweetheart married another man, Saverio left the security of his job on the factory line in Detroit, earning his father’s disapproval but opening wide the door to success as a big-band singer. Along his way to stardom, Saverio changed his name to Tony Arma and discovered a talent for romancing—but never marrying—the ladies. But once he meets Chi Chi, his bachelor days are numbered. From a large, boisterous Italian family, Chi Chi is eager to have a life like Tony’s, with the freedom to sing and travel the country. She wants no part of marriage with its shackles. Soon Chi Chi and Tony are touring together, eventually developing a profitable shtick, with Chi Chi writing bestselling songs and Tony serenading them to dreamy audiences. It’s only a matter of time before Tony proposes. After all, unlike his other girls, Chi Chi offers Tony not only beauty and charm, but also the stability of a home. The lovers’ work in the entertainment industry gives way to a marriage blessed with babies yet held apart by war. Once reunited, Chi Chi’s independence and Tony’s philandering further fracture their marriage. But as Tony’s path wends from woman to woman, Chi Chi forges a new life on her own terms. A mistress of the sweeping family saga, bestselling author Trigiani (Kiss Carlo, 2017, etc.) sets Chi Chi and Tony’s lifelong love affair against the grand stage of World War II through the postwar boom years and the women’s liberation movement, tracing a society catching up with Chi Chi’s determination to control her own financial and personal freedom.
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-231925-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.
Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan’s meditation on the fallen South.
Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names “Mudbound.” Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry’s enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father’s wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm’s tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked—but the innocent suffer as well. “Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong,” claims Jamie McAllan in the book’s equivocal dénouement. “Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right.”
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-569-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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