Unequal to Scott’s best work (The Manikin, 1996, etc.), but her voice remains one of contemporary fiction’s most eloquent...
Scott continues to swim against the literary mainstream with her seventh novel, set on the island of Elba and in the mind and memory of an elderly Italian-American woman.
In 1944, she was ten-year-old Adriana Nardi, the sheltered daughter of a wealthy family whose comfortable estate (“La Chiatta”) was a safe haven during climactic battles between Nazi and Fascist troops and the Allied armies pledged to liberate Elba (a storied place known as Napoleon’s place of exile). In the present day, she is Newark matron Mrs. Robert Rundel, who on the day after her 70th birthday, suffers a pulmonary embolism while aboard a train approaching New York’s Penn Station—as she indulges emotional reminiscences of that long-ago “liberation.” Scott juxtaposes expertly the thoughts of impulsive young Adriana and those of the Senegalese soldier she finds, hurt and hiding: Senegalese teenager Amdu Diop, who had become separated from his regiment, and who is—at Adriana’s urging—given shelter at La Chiatta. It’s a rich premise, but the story’s action lags for too long behind redundant (albeit vivid and credible) declarations of Adriana’s adoring fascination with the dark exotic stranger, and Amdu’s charmingly naïve envisionings of himself as a potential humanitarian and savior (perhaps even a saint), whose ineptness as a fighting man threaten his exile from the virtual Eden that is liberated Elba. The narrative is enriched by Scott’s renderings of the thoughts of intelligent Nardi matriarch Giulia and of her inanely self-centered brother Mario (whose actions precipitate tragic misunderstandings). But similar use of Mrs. Rundel’s fellow train passengers amount to no more than pointless distractions. Amdu and Adriana are nevertheless powerfully appealing figures, and they alone (and together) make this ungainly novel well worth reading.
Unequal to Scott’s best work (The Manikin, 1996, etc.), but her voice remains one of contemporary fiction’s most eloquent and essential.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-01053-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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