A pleasant digression through the back streets, though served up with a bit more nostalgia than may be good for you.
A neighborhood mosaic by the prolific Chicago novelist (Ghost of the Sun, 1990, etc.).
Petrakis’s tenth novel re-creates the atmosphere of the Windy City’s Greek Town through the eyes of local restaurateur and family man Orestes Panos. Orestes has seen a lot of change in his day. Just 50, he has lived all his life in Greek Town, where he runs a restaurant, the Olympia, that serves as a kind of townsquare for the locals who invariably pass through at some point each day. There’s the journalist Ted Banapoulos, Karvelas the undertaker; Orestes’s physician Dr. Savas; his parish priest Fr. Anton, and the nouveau riche meatpacker Sam Tzangaris. Happily married for 23 years, Orestes loves his wife Dessie but is beginning to chafe under the constraints of domestic life. For one thing, his odious mother-in-law Stavroula has recently moved in; for another, his teenaged daughter Marika is bleeding him dry with her shopping sprees. Orestes’s son Paulie is thinking of walking out of the shotgun marriage that his young wife’s family pushed him into the year before, and Paulie’s doubts are giving Orestes ideas of his own. When he meets Sarah Fleming, a young artist who lived in Crete for a while and shares Orestes’s passion for Kazantzakis, Orestes is at first intrigued, then smitten, and finally obsessed. Is this a belated case of the seven-year itch? Whatever it is, it soon takes on a life of its own and infects Orestes with massive pangs of guilt. Too bad he doesn’t know that Dessie has a few secrets of her own. And, in the meantime, Orestes has to find a way of clearing Fr. Anton of the false charges of pedophilia brought against him by the odious Sam Tzangaris. Just another day in the neighborhood.
A pleasant digression through the back streets, though served up with a bit more nostalgia than may be good for you.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-8093-2578-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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