As much intellectual exploration as novel, Yalom’s latest (The Schopenhauer Cure, 2005, etc.) fictional foray into philosophy connects Baruch Spinoza and an agent of the Holocaust.
The Nazi is Alfred Rosenberg, historical figure, war criminal sent to Nuremberg’s gallows, and philosopher-manqué and self-styled intellectual catalyst of German fascism. As a schoolboy, Rosenberg latched onto Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s racist theories. Rosenberg also worshiped Goethe, though he couldn't understand Goethe’s appreciation of Spinoza. Thus, The Spinoza Problem. “Never able to cleanse his mind of the image of the great Goethe genuflecting before the Jew Spinoza,” Rosenberg migrates to Munich, writes for a propaganda sheet and befriends Hitler. In chapters shifting between Spinoza and Rosenberg, Yalom unfolds the dual narratives in clear, straightforward language, following Spinoza as he rejects religious superstition and embraces rationalism while simultaneously sketching the history and social milieu of Jews who fled the Hibernian peninsula for Holland. Spinoza’s conversations with the fictional Franco Benitez, a refugee from Portugal, bring the philosopher to life as he suffers excommunication (cherem), befriends scholars like Franciscus van den Enden and lives “an unencumbered life of contemplation.” Characterizing Spinoza as “the supreme rationalist,” one who “saw an endless stream of causality in the world," Yalom makes the philosopher accessible to a popular audience. He also does a credible job of imagining how the intellectual connection between Goethe and Spinoza would have befuddled the narcissistic Rosenberg, who was trapped in the belief that there are “higher things than reason—honor, blood, courage.” Yalom ends with Spinoza interacting with patrons and Rosenberg on the gallows, followed by an epilogue and an addendum explaining the novel’s impetus and construction. Imaginative and erudite.
Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-02963-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
PROFILES
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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