A thoughtful, often affecting rumination on the way history affects ordinary people (and vice versa).
British journalist Grant’s first novel to be published in the US (after Remind Me Who I Am, Again, the memoir of her mother's dementia, p. 532) was a financial and critical success abroad, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction.
The story is narrated by Evelyn, the illegitimate daughter of an Anglo-Latvian Jew. Evelyn’s father is a vanished cipher known only from a photograph nearly 25 years old, but her mother is a very palpable presence, the mistress of a successful Jewish businessman in 1940s London and the owner of a hairdressing salon, where Evelyn sometimes works. When her mother has a nervous breakdown and dies, “Uncle” Joe, the businessman, suggests that Evelyn go to Palestine to help build a nascent Jewish homeland. Caught up in the many intrigues and cultural clashes of Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate, she finds herself bounced from a kibbutz to the burgeoning city of Tel Aviv, where she reinvents herself as a British hairdresser with an absent husband in the Army. Meanwhile, she falls into an affair with a dashing if secretive young man who may be working for the Irgun. Reduced to its basic plot elements this way, When I Lived in Modern Times sounds like the stuff of melodrama, the sort of foolish and sentimental fiction that is devoured by aging Hadassah ladies. Grant is a thinker, though, a writer who’s fascinated by the way people construct and reconstruct their identities to fit circumstances, and her novel is actually rather cerebral in its approach to its material. She’s extraordinarily good at capturing the feel and smell of ’40s Tel Aviv, vividly re-creating the chaos of a medium-sized town on the verge of becoming a city. And she is no less adept at capturing the sensations of a young woman on the verge of adulthood.
A thoughtful, often affecting rumination on the way history affects ordinary people (and vice versa).Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94594-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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