A finely wrought depiction of turbulence, perhaps too faithfully reflecting the enervating pace of these privileged lives.
First-novelist Jedamus chronicles courtly infighting in tenth-century Japan.
As depicted in this fictitious diary, life is dreary for ladies-in-waiting at the Heian Emperor’s court. They spend their days detangling their floor-length hair, choosing silks for their voluminous robes, composing poetry, practicing calligraphy, applying lead-based products to their faces and teeth and gossiping about their fellow courtiers. Since they can’t be in the presence of men unless concealed by a screen, one wonders how they flirt, much less tryst with their lovers. Somehow, they manage, igniting rivalry between the unnamed narrator and Izumi, a poet, over Heian Japan’s own Don Juan, Kanesuke. As if sowing discord between two former best friends wasn’t enough, Kanesuke seduced the Vestal of Ise, the Emperor’s favorite daughter, causing her to be recalled from her post as resident virgin at a shrine. For this he’s earned banishment to a remote rocky shore, but he continues to foment female unrest with artfully presented missives delivered by courier. The narrator, resentful of the more effusive letters lovelier Izumi receives, spreads a false rumor about Kanesuke and the vestal’s half-sister Sadako, causing Sadako’s disgrace. Hostilities escalate as Izumi exposes the narrator’s calumny and the latter seeks solace with a younger man, I Ching practitioner Masato. The narrator finds she is pregnant by Masato, but children are an untenable encumbrance to a court lady; she already has a son being raised elsewhere. Political instability and pestilence disrupt court indolence. Crown Prince Reizei dies of smallpox. Kanesuke’s return from exile is imminent when Izumi learns to her horror that he has fallen ill. Jedamus’s prose, like a prolonged haiku, captures the Japanese obsession with subtle natural detail and, except for odd Western borrowings like “vestal,” “archbishop” and “rosary,” serves historical verisimilitude well. Sybaritic indulgence and intrigue dominate until the diary’s disordered end signals abrupt flight. Be advised to read the prologue last.
A finely wrought depiction of turbulence, perhaps too faithfully reflecting the enervating pace of these privileged lives.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34907-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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