Comical, thoroughly entertaining, and insightful.
In Eremeeva’s collection of humorous fictional vignettes, an American woman looks back on 20 years living in Russia after marrying her “HRH,” or Handsome (and sometimes Horrible) Russian Husband.
Inspired by romantic, sepia-toned dreams of the doomed Romanovs, Jennifer starts out as a tourist in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, graduating to hosting guided tours and trade delegations. In 1991, she meets “Comrade Smashing,” a military officer: “He had a smile that started in his warm brown eyes and ended at my curled-up toes.” Although she is warned that “Soviet men are impossible,” Jennifer is smitten. The two marry and have a daughter; her husband leaves the military to go into business, and she becomes head of public relations and marketing at a large bank. With the couple doing well in the post-Soviet economy, Jennifer quits her job to write a book much like this one: its topics include home furnishings, food, expatriate life, dachas (country cottages owned by Russians), hospitality, and Russia’s new rich. Eremeeva’s debut is often laugh-out-loud funny; for example, while arguing with HRH about medical insurance—he’s against it—Jennifer realizes that for Russians, “The long-range plan for the distant future option is never their default position except where root vegetables are concerned.” She undergirds her observations with considerations of Russian history that help explain the country’s foibles, such as weather, geography, and its history of serfdom. Regarding dachas, she blends witty observations (one dacha has a state-of-the-art sauna but “eleventh-century toilet arrangements”) with more serious commentary: “The fact of the matter is…the whole dacha thing is a well-oiled machine designed to keep indentured service for females alive and well.” The chapters on Jennifer’s expat friends hold less interest, except for what they reveal about Russia; her interior design friend, for example, is outshone by the work he’s commissioned to produce, such as a staircase “curved in an aggressive trajectory up to the second floor from its anchor: a ten-foot-high bronze nymph holding aloft a torch…[which] burst into neon lime-green, orange, and purple flame.”
Comical, thoroughly entertaining, and insightful.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-937650-31-5
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Small Batch Books
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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