A mix of lurid potboiler and classic bildungsroman, the story is occasionally too knowing for its own good, but its prose is...
Shrewd study of four Sex and the City wannabes.
This is a deceptively breezy account of four women whose lives occasionally intersect through the men they know. The therapist for two of them is the uncle of a third; one of them has a brother who wants a job with two of the others; still another ends up married to the man who has starred in one’s political documentary. The novel is episodic, driven by family drama, sexual frustration and drunken tirades at glamorous parties. Despite being organized around fairly momentous events, it is most successful as a character study. The women at its center are relatively talented, relatively successful, relatively young urban hipsters seeking something or someone emotionally powerful enough to overcome their studied irony. Although we’ve seen these anxious, rudderless types before, Lindstrom is unafraid to push them to their limits. Unpleasant characters, for example, don’t learn a lesson about themselves and become chastened; they remain unpleasant even though they become more sympathetic. A talented documentary maker and a driven film producer don’t change the world; they become successful by deciding that personal integrity need never trouble their professional lives. Lindstrom’s great strength is her acerbic, yet strangely affecting understanding that the compromises people make with their ideals tell us more about them than the ideals themselves. The author moves sure-footedly between the stories of the women, but by the end, two of them emerge as the primary characters. In the case of these two especially, Lindstrom creates wonderfully rich personalities and quite distinct and distinctive patterns of speech and thought.
A mix of lurid potboiler and classic bildungsroman, the story is occasionally too knowing for its own good, but its prose is fresh and its insights into the aging-hipster-turned-ambitious-careerwoman are both biting and poignant.Pub Date: May 23, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-232-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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