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
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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