A dark-hued lament for the loss of jolly old England a millennium ago, when psychopath William the Conqueror used a bagful of tricks to best good King Harold, this saga from the wide-ranging Rathbone (Blame Hitler, p. 1076, etc.) has its moments but can’t sustain them The story comes out in the halting, painful recollections of Walt, one of Harold’s inner circle of advisers and bodyguards who has wandered far from the Battle at Hastings in 1066, where he lost his right hand as well as his king. Dazed and feverish, Walt has crossed Europe before meeting fellow traveler Quint outside of Constantinople; the ex-monk, realizing Walt has within him a tale that will pass many a weary mile on the road, suggests he pay their way on a journey to the Holy Land. As Walt recalls the time leading up to the Norman invasion, when competing bids for the English throne gave rise to intrigues like the one that brought Harold to Normandy to be tricked by William’s magician into swearing an oath of fealty that would later haunt him, an adventure en route brings them into the company of that same trickster—whom Walt had seen drop dead in Hastings. The conjurer expresses remorse for his earlier role and offers his own memories of William’s preparations, while Walt describes the desperate days after Harold’s coronation, when, faced not only with the Norman threat but another from the north, he had also to quell dissent from within. Walt, healing slowly as he lets go of his grief at not having died with his king, decides to go home before reaching Jerusalem, but not before providing the blow-by-blow details of Harold’s heroic last stand. Popping the clutch once too often in shifting between memory, history, and life on the road, but, still, an often haunting evocation of a tumultuous time of glory and grief.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-24213-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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