For her fifth novel, the British author offers a seductive snapshot of Noël Coward, that consummate man of the theater.
Most of the action occurs during one week in 1971. The recently knighted Sir Noël is living in his tiny hilltop retreat in Jamaica, the eponymous Firefly, above his much larger, bustling home below. He divides his time between there and Switzerland, avoiding England for tax reasons. The great man is in poor health, suffering dizzy spells and leading a sedentary life (he will die two years later, at age 73). Down the hill, his unobtrusive partner, Graham Payn, takes care of business. What’s different about this week? Noël’s peerless manservant, Miguel, an older, married man who arranges everything just so, is away, visiting a dying relative. Standing in for him is Patrice, an exuberant 22-year-old. The relationship between the young blood with big dreams and the literary lion tugged back by memories is at the heart of the novel. Patrice hopes to move to London, to be a silver service waiter at the Ritz, and presses his employer for a reference. Noël tries to discourage him. “The Ritz is very white, front of house.” The playwright is affectionate and irascible by turns, cursing with abandon while enjoying the young man’s cheerful naïveté. Jenkins mixes in Noël’s memories (of childhood, of louche encounters, of the American boyfriend who stole his heart and other treasures) with his current socializing, much reduced. There are amusingly acerbic vignettes of visitors: an airhead movie actress, a pushy doctor. Still, it is the sparring with Patrice that keeps Noël in the present. His servant is boyishly insistent on pinning down his orientation: “So you are a definite homosexual, Boss?”
A charming but unsentimental evocation of celebrity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60945-140-0
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
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A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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