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SUCH GOOD WORK

Name: SUCH GOOD WORK
Author: Johannes Lichtman
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9564-8

by Johannes Lichtman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

A bit short on narrative drive, but Lichtman’s low-key treatment of two highly charged subjects is refreshing.

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The international refugee crisis and the struggle to stay sober preoccupy roughly equal portions of this thoughtful first novel, which follows an American graduate student to Sweden in the fraught years 2014-15.

Unable to stay clean in the U.S., Jonas Anderson takes advantage of his dual citizenship and the concomitant free tuition to enroll at Lunds University, hoping a change of scenery will ease his craving for drugs. In fact, he still spends a lot of his time thinking about how great it would be to get high—true to life, no doubt, but not terribly compelling in fiction. Fortunately for Jonas and the novel, he also casts a sharp eye over the Swedish social and political landscape, noting that, while the Swedes resolutely and commendably welcome refugees flooding in from the Middle East, they are far more ambivalent about the Roma often found panhandling on street corners. Spotting other people’s hypocrisies is one of Jonas’ specialties, and it might serve him well if he ever gets back to his neglected creative writing, but so far substituting alcohol for drugs has done little to enhance his creativity. And he’s not a particularly admirable character himself; he freely admits that the main attraction of his German exchange-student girlfriend, Anja, is that she’ll be gone soon; temporary relationships work best for commitment-averse Jonas. Only after he moves to the nearby city of Malmö and impulsively signs up to teach Swedish and English to young refugees does he begin to think about people other than himself. He becomes particularly close with a boy named Aziz, and he learns to maneuver sensitively with children who have suffered and lost more than he can imagine. By the time the Paris terrorist attacks prompt the Swedish government to close its borders, we see that Jonas has achieved a new stability and sense of purpose—even though he’s not entirely sure of it himself.

A bit short on narrative drive, but Lichtman’s low-key treatment of two highly charged subjects is refreshing.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-9564-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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BORDEAUX

by Paul Torday ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2009

Vintage.

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A complex tale of obsession is precisely distilled into a haunting character portrayal, in this second novel from the gifted British author (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, 2007).

The subtitle denotes four years (2006–02) in the life of protagonist and narrator Wilberforce (his first name initially withheld), who creates a successful computer software company, sells it in order to accept an irresistible offer and thereafter devotes himself to the cultivation and enjoyment of a prized wine collection. That collection is bequeathed, with strings attached, to Wilberforce by his older friend Francis Black, a bachelor whose inherited wealth has gone to amass a huge array of choice Bordeaux (and other wines), kept in a vast vault (“undercroft”) beneath his family’s estate Caerlyon, outside London. Caerlyon suggests “Corleone” so much so that the reader suspects there’s more to Francis Black than the benign mentor he appears to be. Torday keeps us guessing, as precise imagery suggests the younger man’s immersion in what is perhaps a religious vocation, perhaps a surrender to temptation. Or both, we surmise, as Wilberforce’s story unspools in reverse order, beginning with the upshot of his love for Catherine, a vibrant beauty betrothed to another man; offering a poignant picture of his unhappy foster childhood and all but empty young adulthood; and climaxing with a (brilliantly described) grouse hunt, during which an episode of “innocent happiness” vibrates with the strains of an ironic prophecy of his future. Eventually, we learn Wilberforce’s first name and understand his reluctance to reveal it. But the heritage of sorrow that imprisons him within limits he both has and has not set for himself makes us think of Fitzgerald’s “great” (and, ultimately, unfulfilled) Gatsby. This elegantly conceived novel also reminds us from time to time of another Great Expectations, minus that classic novel’s unconvincing happy ending.

Vintage.

Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-15-101354-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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DAVITA'S HARP

by Chaim Potok ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 11, 1985

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Jason's family is making their ``third move in five years''; once again, Jason says good-bye to his friends and packs his belongings. Meanwhile, he finds comfort up in a dogwood tree. It listens to his worries and even answers, and when it's time to leave an old Ilana Davita Chandal is the New York-born daughter of Michael and Anne, both Communists of the Thirties. Michael is a Maine native and newspaper writer; Anne (once Channah) is a brilliant ideologue with a bitter European-Jewish past(her rabbi-father's paternal neglect, pogroms); they are atheistic, committed, peripatetic. (Party cell meetings necessitate many moves to different apartments throughout the city.) And, now and again, the Chandals give respectful shelter to an old friend of Anne's from Europe, Jakob Daw, a tubercular writer of political allegories. As liana Davita grows up, then, Daw introduces her to the widened-out perimeters of the imagination. Meanwhile, David Dinn—a Jewish boy living next door to the Chandals at the Seagate beach one summer—introduces her to an almost opposite world: the strange, beguiling forms of religious observance. So, while her father goes to Spain to cover the Civil War, Ilana Davita begins to attend a local synagogue on Saturdays (against her mother's wishes); then her father is killed at Guernica—and mother Anne loses her political faith with the Stalin/Hitler pact. There's still more loss ahead: Jakob Daw, deported from refuge in the US because of his politics, dies in France. And eventually Ilana Davita and her mother—both cast adrift—come ever closer into the orbit of consolation that religion can provide: Anne nurses Michael's devoutly Christian sister Sarah; Ilana Davita enrolls in a yeshiva; later Anne marries David Dinn's father, an immigration lawyer she knew from Europe, an Orthodox Jew who tried to help with Jakob Daw's fight to remain in the country. Thus, the reclamation of Jewish heritage is complete at last—Yet Potok refuses to end the novel on this uplifting note. Instead, the theme of justice rises at the finale—as Ilana Davita, a crack student at the yeshiva, finds herself discriminated against because of her sex: Potok seems to be arguing both for sexual equality in Judaic practice and for a more liberal Torah hermeneutics, involving allegory and imagination. As in The Book o Lights, Potok's themes in this long novel are developed slowly, sometimes repetitiously often undramatically; Ilana Davita's narration, which has a somewhat YA-ish quality, tends to underline each point rather too heavily. Still, despite the faulty pacing, the ideas here are rich, provocative, thickly interesting: the soul's desire for a sustainable faith, the tension between political, worldly justice and religious, spiritual justice. And, for readers who've been happy to settle down and tackle Potok's previous ventures into philosophical fiction, this will not be a disappointment.gardener gives him a sapling that promises similar comfort in his future home. Stagily wistful, overwritten, long, and punctuated with pointless scenes, this well-known novelist's first children's story has little to recommend it. Auth captures some of the atmosphere that goes with any big childhood change, but can't compensate for the story's unwieldiness and inconsistencies. At one point, the mother's ``sacrifice'' for the move is that she'll give up her travel-agency job. That idea is dropped, and readers are given a scene of her at her parents' graves: ``It's hard for me to leave them.'' It would be, if there were any emotional authenticity within these pages—but there's not. Picture book. 5-9)