Exhausting and disappointing.
The formation and disintegration of a family, overshadowed by the rape of Alaska.
British novelist Hardy (Mister Candid, 2005, etc.) produces pages as if from some bottomless source. The back stories of her principal characters are copious, and whether writing of Minnesota hog farms, trawler fishing around the Aleutians or Irish subsistence crofters, she has anecdotes, local color and incident to spare. Two central figures emerge from this wealth of description: poor Irish beauty Maggie Regan and haunted American oil man Billy-Ray Rickman. Maggie escapes rural poverty in County Mayo to taste freedom briefly, working in London, before returning in shame. Billy-Ray survives a scarring childhood—the death of his two brothers in World War II destroys his parents—to become a successful geophysicist riding the wave of oil exploration. The point at which the paths of Maggie and Billy-Ray intersect is the book’s pivotal moment and the reason for its confusing back-and-forth timeline, spanning the 1950s to 2000. Intended as some kind of epic, and freighted with heavy moral themes about the despoliation of the wilderness and the expropriation of Native Indian lands, the story has the requisite breadth and intelligence but falls short when it comes to the actual plot. In essence it chronicles, lengthily and rather flatly, Billy-Ray’s fall from grace. He sacrifices youthful ideals—respect for the earth’s majesty, appreciation of its wild beauty—as well as his happy marriage to a British blue blood in exchange for blind service to the energy industry (he’s involved in the extraction of black gold from Alaska, whatever the environmental or ethical cost). He is last seen skulking in the background during George W. Bush’s election. For all its devotion to texture as well as weighty themes, the novel fails to ignite, offering absorption and a tragic mood but cool characters and ultimately, an oddly empty reading experience.
Exhausting and disappointing.Pub Date: April 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6849-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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