by Johnny Townsend ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2010
A collection of short stories set along the connections of gay life, Jewish life and Mormon life.
This 2010 collection from Townsend (Flying Over Babel, 2011, etc.) features 12 stories of lives caught in the conflict of public religion and private identity; the young men in these tales are all searching for a larger happiness, be it social or spiritual or even sexual (“If penguins can be monogamous,” says one character, “we ought to be able to manage it as well”). Obstacles abound—too profusely, in fact; most of these stories suffer because of an emphasis on shocking material. In the long title story, for instance, the burlesque of a rabbi creating a perfect lover out of clay drowns out a rather touching story of frustrated love trying to make itself heard. To one extent or another, this is true of every story here, and after a while, even Townsend’s sharp ear for dialogue and often nuanced treatment of lust can’t soften the text’s emphasis on prompting gasps of outrage from conservative readers. In one story, two good-looking young men find friendship through a shared love of the Talmud—but also through a shared love of frantic shagging in the afternoon, which feels hastily tacked on to a more cerebral but also more involving story. This is, of course, the signature danger of porn: it tends to kill all aesthetics but its own, and its own is usually very, very simple. Townsend is already given to telegraphing his punches: “When I was a kid, I loved staying in the kitchen to hear the women talk,” one of his characters confesses, and the reader can only sigh at this often-used staple of gay coming-of-age stories. A strong collection, but its internal conflicts—between sensitive depiction of Jewish intellectual life and raunchy tales of porn—ultimately work at cross-purposes.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1609104412
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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