A disquieting allegory for the rise and fall of man, played out in the fractured soul of a genius.
What does it mean to be a mere fiend in a time of monsters?
In any other era, the life of Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder might have been just another cautionary tale about the sins of hubris. In Variations on the Beast, this gifted musical prodigy has been born into exactly the right era–that of the Third Reich–to feed his monstrous arrogance and narcissism as he rises to fame and glory. Told from Herr Kapp’s uniquely derisive point-of-view, the book captures his life over the course of 11 episodes between 1917 and the end of World War II. Born a bastard, the young musician stumbles into study under some of Europe’s great conductors in Vienna, Austria. Kapp’s brusque nature pushes away those who are trying to help him and enrages his competitors, but his strutting potency, both musical and physical, helps him con and manipulate mentors, friends and lovers. Kapp’s ambition proves deadly for Krisztina, his good-natured but eccentric girlfriend. When she becomes pregnant, he abandons her. After she dies following a botched abortion, the conductor is firmly committed to his bitter course. Despite suffering from hysterical fits, Kapp is a slave to both his ambition and his self-indulgence. His rise to prominence as the generalmusikdirektor of Vienna’s finest orchestra is assured when he conducts Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, a performance that brings him to the attention of the burgeoning National Socialist Party. Kapp changes his name to the more refined Kapp-Dortmunder, rising alongside Hitler to the heights of influence. By the time war breaks out, the conductor is entrenched among Nazi leaders, including Goebbels and Göring, all the while ignoring the sound advice of legendary composer Richard Strauss. Grinberg succeeds in making the obsessive composer a convincing, if deeply disturbing, character, and his questions about the behavior of the “Good Germans”–those who reaped the benefits of Hitler’s machinations while ignoring the apparent atrocities in its society–are valid; the intellectual curiosity makes the experience of reading the book no less emotionally taxing. It all comes to an implausible ending in which the maestro is simultaneously acquitted of his crimes and permanently marked by them.
A disquieting allegory for the rise and fall of man, played out in the fractured soul of a genius.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-9768181-1-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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