A convincing account of a forgotten injustice, given strangeness and power by its uncanny, incantatory World War II setting.
An often intriguing novel about a young man growing up on the Isle of Man in the 1940s, in which World War II is at once distant and ever present.
In the beginning of Costain’s debut, Erik, the young narrator, stumbles through a familiar trifecta of school, church, and family, living a more or less unexceptional (but enjoyably written) childhood among the fellow residents of his island home. Among these semimythic figures are eccentric gossips, elderly Elizabethan remnants, and most notably, British soldiers. These troops are entrusted with guarding the continental prisoners held in Mooragh Internment Camp, which is located, somehow both prominently and unobtrusively, in Erik’s small hometown of Ramsey. Soon, Erik’s uneventful life takes a turn when he meets one of the prisoners there: Jacob Weiss, an Austrian Jew who fled the continent during Hitler’s rise. Although the novel gets off to a slow start, the narrative hits its stride once Erik meets Jacob and starts to learn his story, and the alternation between Erik’s everyday adventures on the Isle of Man and Jacob’s recollections of his continental past offers an effective, and moving, contrast. Throughout, Costain layers the novel with evocative historical details and oddities. For example, aside from occasional eruptions of violence, the war often remains quite far away: the only victim of German bombing on the Isle of Man, Erik writes, was “a small dead frog,” which was displayed, years later, in the Manx Museum as part of an exhibit on the island’s role in the war. For Jacob, on the other hand, the conflict keeps forcing its way into his life despite his best efforts: “We had all gone quietly to bed and were wakened to this nightmare in a country we thought we could trust; in a place we thought we were safe,” he remarks, reflecting on the shock of his sudden arrest and internment.
A convincing account of a forgotten injustice, given strangeness and power by its uncanny, incantatory World War II setting.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1460226827
Page Count: 472
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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