Next book

BIOGRAFI

A TRAVELER'S TALE

A New Zealand novelist mixes fantasy with fact in this unusual recreation of his search through post-Communist Albania for the late dictator Enver Hoxha's former double. As a child, Jones writes, his knowledge of Albania was limited to what he overheard on a neighbor's short-wave radio: the self- congratulatory message that heroic Albanian Communists flourished under the guidance of their wise leader, Enver Hoxha. Years later, after Hoxha's death and the fall of his regime, the novelist heard rumors of the reappearance of the dictator's double, a village dentist forced to undergo extensive plastic surgery in order to stand in for Hoxha at official events. Once the dictator was dead, the dentist was so abused by Hoxha-hating Albanians that he attempted to cut out his eyes with a razor, then disappeared. Making it his mission to find this dentist, Jones arrives in chaotic Albania, where food is virtually nonexistent, electrical power switches on and off at will, and governments topple at a moment's notice. The author encounters citizens obsessed with recreating and recounting their own life stories after having been persecuted for decades due to supposed political flaws in their biografis, official dossiers compiled by the secret police. Overwhelmed by accounts of routine betrayal and torture, Jones abandons his attempt to find the real dentist and simply invents (without stating so in the text) a dying vagrant whose biografi is pieced together from the stories of people he met. A hard winter leads to this fictional dentist's death, while Jones—the character and the author—hightails it back home. Intended to reflect the bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland quality of Albanian life in the 1990s, this account makes no distinction between what is and isn't true—which unfortunately imparts an annoying sense of unreliability to the tale. (First serial to Grand Street; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; author tour)

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994

ISBN: 0-15-600128-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

Categories:
Close Quickview