Earthy, overheated first novel, on the theme of Latin American machismo and its discontents, by a Cuban-born author whom we're invited to compare with Laura Esquivel. Similar popular success may indeed greet this florid family chronicle, set in Cuba and covering the years 191138 in the lives of the lusty butcher Maximiliano, his gorgeous and devoted wife Dolores, and their four surviving children. When the couple first meet, fall thunderously in love, and marry (defying Dolores's wealthy landowning father), the poverty they endure early on forces them to surrender their eldest son Mani to live out his formative years with his grandparents, leaving him thereafter burdened by his sense of himself as ``a child nobody every really wanted.'' Their other children suffer as well: daughter Merced with a troubled young husband whose inability to love her disastrously erodes his own self-worth; and second son Gustavo, a would-be poet whose courage in defying his father's expectations fails when Gustavo cannot—as their macho code demands—murder his faithless wife and her lover. ``The secret of the bulls'' that rush through Havana's streets flaunting their rough masculinity is that their momentum is carrying them toward the slaughterhouse. If this novel has an animating idea, so to speak, that would be it. Bernardo conveys such deeply uninteresting truisms in a bland style that's crammed with sentimental clichÇs and flattened by repetitive sentence fragments. Feminists won't be the only readers who'll howl with mingled outrage and hilarity at the lame-brained retrograde view of sex, characterized by such drippy diapasons as this description of lovers as ``a god with a scepter of power between his legs possessing and being possessed by a goddess with a diadem of copper between hers.'' Deliriously ``romantic,'' insufferably maudlin, shamelessly derivative (including a blatant steal from The Godfather, Part II), and very, very stupid. Wait for the movie—and pray to whatever gods there be that it won't have a voice-over narration.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81817-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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