An engaging story of love in the worst of circumstances.
Block, in her debut novel, tells the desperate tale of a couple attempting to survive the horrors of Nazi occupation.
In September 1939, Aron Matuszienski is captured on the battlefield after the German army launches a surprise invasion of Poland and routs the country’s defense forces. Aron is doubly terrified of his captors, for he’s not just a Polish soldier—he’s also a Jew, and he keeps that fact a secret. It’s an unlikely talent that saves him: Aron is a skilled shoemaker, and despite their sneering disdain for the conquered, the “Germans respected trades, real craftsmen.” For a few months, he’s sufficiently fed and housed in Germany and treated better than other Polish prisoners. During this time, he thinks back to Gitel, the girl he loved before the war, whose memory he can’t erase. His cover is soon blown, though, when he accidentally says a prayer in Hebrew and a Polish rival quickly exposes his true identity. They ship him back to Poland for slave labor, but when he arrives, he’s reunited with Gitel. Against all reason, and in the ruins of their former lives, they embark on a love affair. When their marriage results in a daughter, it forces them to make terrible choices; preserving their family is no longer optional, but the cost of survival may be more than they’re willing to pay. Although the novel begins in 1939, several early chapters jump back to earlier periods in Aron’s and Gitel’s lives; their story continues through the war and into its immediate aftermath. Block writes in a sharp, lurching prose that captures the awful poetry of forced marches, clacking train cars (“The train bucked and strained on the tracks, the wheels buried in four feet of snow groaned to a halt”), and orders barked in many languages. She illustrates not only the desolate, selfish calamity of the war, but also the hard, unsentimental love that takes root in such a setting. The novel perhaps relies a bit too much on history to determine its shape—the ending, for example, tapers rather than terminates—but overall, it provides an affecting look at a truly terrible situation.
An engaging story of love in the worst of circumstances.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1483419619
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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