The situation is hopeless but not serious, they used to say in Vienna. The great post-WW I Austrian moralists, Kraus, Musil, Roth, couched the gloomiest judgments in light, entertaining forms. The English-speaking world is just catching up with these modern masters. This, the tenth in Overlook's Roth series, makes a good introduction to his incomparable work. With Stendhalian clarity and brio, with a Balzacian, not to say Marxian, grasp of society's inner workings, in writing that is precise in image and profound but never ponderous, Roth graphed the aftershocks of empires' collapse and the addled lives of sons who lack their fathers' vitality and their hold on simple truths. Right and Left is more malicious than Roth's loving Trotta family saga (The Radetzky March, The Emperor's Tomb) because he's writing about ascendant Germany. With great acuity, he charts the slow metamorphosis of a 1920's Berlin dandy, an Anglophile, into a chemical industry magnate, and the transformation of his proto-Nazi brother into a trendy left-wing journalist. In the post-WW I generation of hollow men, ``right'' and ``left'' are interchangeable, and a taste for culture leads right to the manufacture of poison gas. Pulling the plot-strings here is a fascinating character patterned on Balzac's Vautrin. Nikolai Brandeis has shed his illusions, his vanity, and has only a kind of philanthropic contempt for others. He builds a financial empire and then walks away from it in disgust. His mysterious disappearance on the book's last page suggests that in the age of mass media, the pursuit of truth requires silence, exile, and cunning. The companion piece, Legend of the Holy Drinker, shows a series of small miracles restoring the dignity of a homeless drunk; it breathes a democratic compassion and delicate tact utterly lacking among us. The second of these was Roth's last work, his graceful exit, in 1939, from a world that didn't deserve him. The very British translation is loyal to his light, ironic touch.
Pub Date: May 4, 1992
ISBN: 0-87951-448-5
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland(1992) to An Officer and a Spy(2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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