A complex and tightly paced historical thriller.
Spies, diplomats, and lovers cross paths in Berlin in this Cold War–era novel.
Flanders (The Northwest Country, 2016, etc.) follows his First Trumpet trilogy with an engrossing tale of intrigue and duplicity. It’s 1959, and young American diplomat Dillon Randolph has been transferred to Berlin after his last posting resulted in a scandalous affair with an ambassador’s wife. Determined not to disappoint his distinguished family again, he agrees to avoid romantic entanglements in Germany. Luckily for readers, desire can’t be dictated, and he finds himself immediately drawn to East German actress Christa Schiller. However, she’s working for the Stasi (the East German secret police), and she’s agreed to lure Dillon into another scandal in order to protect her imprisoned younger brother. In the midst of these developments arrives Feliks Hawes, a British intelligence officer who’s been tasked with identifying the source of Secret Intelligence Service leaks from Berlin. The divided city, as U.S. security officer Lars Swanson claims, is positively “crawling with spies,” and Flanders continuously expands the novel’s scope to deliver a disorienting, heady mix of Soviet, East German, American, Hungarian, and British characters, each with his or her own agenda. As Christa remarks, “You can never be sure who is informing, who will guard your secrets, and who will trade them for their advantage.” The love-story plotline offers some of the book’s stalest lines (“Confronted by her beauty, he realized that he still desired her, that he wanted nothing more in that moment than to kiss her lips”). However, it also provides subtle commentary on how beauty can blind people, with each lover underestimating the other. Similarly, several intelligence officers miscalculate the Soviet Union’s dedication to isolating its sector of the city. In this uncertain period before the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall, characters move from one side of the city to the other as easily as they shift alliances—unaware of the life-altering change in store.
A complex and tightly paced historical thriller.Pub Date: March 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9908675-6-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Munroe Hill Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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