Cercas’s lyric intensity becomes quite moving (especially toward the end) in a beautiful account of loss and reconciliation.
Cercas’s US debut is a strange and intriguing amalgam of epic, elegy, and mystery about a journalist’s efforts to uncover the story behind a soldier’s quasi-miraculous escape from firing squad in the Spanish Civil War.
How much of the tale is fiction, many readers will ask, since most of the characters are historical figures and the narrator, like the author, is a Spanish writer named Javier Cercas—but never mind all that. We begin with a broken-down journalist in a provincial town who has written a few novels that flopped and is depressed because his father has died and his wife has left him. While researching an article commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Javier hears an interesting legend and works it into the piece: Nationalist hero Rafael Sánchez Mazas, founder of the right-wing Falange Party and onetime cabinet minister under Franco, was once captured by leftist troops, shot by firing squad—and survived. Not only that, but afterward, making his way across enemy lines, he was discovered and recognized by a Communist guerrilla: an unknown militiaman who deliberately let him get away. Among the usual letters to the editor after the article is published, Javier receives contradictory leads as to the true identity of the soldier, and he becomes increasingly intrigued. He tracks down the son of a Communist partisan who sheltered Sánchez Mazas during his escape and discovers a notebook kept by the escapee describing his ordeal. Eventually, he pieces together an account of Sánchez Mazas’s exploits during the last days of the war, and he finally meets the man whom he believes spared his life. But is it really him? It doesn’t matter—like the sled in Citizen Kane, the man in the forest (whoever he was) eventually becomes much less interesting than the search itself.
Cercas’s lyric intensity becomes quite moving (especially toward the end) in a beautiful account of loss and reconciliation.Pub Date: March 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-384-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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
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
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