An original, painful tale of youthful isolation.
Conjoined twins in the Soviet Union face loneliness and alienation in Eliseev’s debut novel.
Faith and Hope were born anatomically attached at the hip—a sight so shocking that the midwife who delivered them fainted. Their mother was so horrified that she was persuaded by a nurse to sign their death certificate and give them away to scientists; the father—away on business—was informed of their passing by telegram. First, they were studied as scientific anomalies, but eventually they attended a special boarding school. Later, they moved to a foster home for disabled children, where they suffered grim indignities and grotesque mistreatment. When one sick child at the home dies of illness as a result of utter neglect, the attendants treat the rest of the kids like they’re prisoners doing penance. The pair become intoxicated with the possibility of a surgical separation, and they eventually escape in the hope of finding a doctor willing to perform the procedure—one that would likely kill one of them. On their own, they soon suffer extraordinary cruelty; at one point, a truck driver picks them up as hitchhikers and brutally rapes them. Homeless, penniless, and ostracized from society, they’re reduced to panhandling as they set out to find the mother they never knew. Hope becomes suicidal as the two yearn to lead a normal life, free of deprivation. Author Eliseev unflinchingly limns the psychological nuances of the twins’ predicament, showing that despite their intimate connection, each longs to be free: “I often wondered what it would be like—having your own body, going where you wanted, doing what you liked doing,” Faith thinks. “How does it feel not being the hostage of somebody else, even if it is your closest and dearest relative?” Eliseev’s prose is straightforward and appropriately childlike, and Faith’s wisdom and anguish are heart-rending. As she narrates the story in the first person, her emotional range swings from endearingly optimistic to despairing. The backdrop of the tale—set in the twilight years of the USSR—vividly depicts the social dysfunction of a so-called “normal” society of “one-headed” people.
An original, painful tale of youthful isolation.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-911414-23-0
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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