Vintage Trollope, fluidly and accessibly written as always, now with an American twist.
The prolific Trollope (Next of Kin, 2001, etc.) spins another engaging tale about life‘s twists and turns, occasioned as much by character as circumstance, and the ways family ties both help and hinder.
Since college, art historian Gillon Stokes has alternately fled and returned to Charleston, South Carolina, drawn by love for her relatives but finding them constraining once she’s actually there. When she learns that sister Ashley is pregnant, Gillon decides to leave Charleston again and accept a temporary art conservation job in London so she can avoid perfect Ashley’s sure-to-be-perfect pregnancy. Meanwhile in London, photographer Henry Atkins, in a professional rut, feels ambivalent about live-in girlfriend Tilly’s assertion that it’s time for a commitment. After Gillon moves into a spare room in the apartment he and journalist Tilly share, he’s only too happy to accept her casual invitation to visit her family in Charleston. The Stokeses are Old Charleston, with all the privileges and baggage that position entails, and Henry falls in love with the family, the city, and Gillon. Back for Ashley’s delivery, Gillon is troubled by his uncritical acceptance of her kin and her own betrayal of Tilly, who treated her kindly. While our American heroine learns more about her inability ever to leave home completely (“There’s nowhere else that I feel so vulnerable. And because of that, so alive”), English Tilly also examines her life. Realizing that Henry’s not coming back, she becomes closer to her divorced mother, appreciating the matter-of -fact-comfort that Margot offers. The author deftly sketches her characters’ situations with her usual hardheaded but empathetic understanding of the way the world works for men and women.
Vintage Trollope, fluidly and accessibly written as always, now with an American twist.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03097-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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