Doughty is a competent narrator, but her characters are dwarfed by the terrible times through which they move.
A Holocaust novel featuring the Gypsies of Central Europe.
Gypsies are dirty parasites. That stereotype is swiftly demolished by British author Doughty (An English Murder, 2000, etc.) as she introduces us to a small group of Kalderash Roma in Czechoslovakia. These nomadic Gypsies, who live in their wagons, are industrious, self-supporting, and squeaky clean (they even have domestic purity laws). Formerly coppersmiths, they pick fruit in summer and make barrel hoops in winter. Their Big Man is the tenderhearted Josef, whose beautiful wife Anna has just given birth to a boy (Emil). It’s 1927; only the hated gadje (white non-Roma) stain their idyllic existence; whether they are Czech or German makes no difference. Their rules and regulations culminate in 1942 with Registration Day, a ruse to round up all Gypsies and intern them. The heart of the novel is their experience in the Czech camp. As they drop like flies, what is initially harrowing quickly becomes numbing. Josef sickens and enters the no-exit infirmary. Emil’s life is made hell by a sadistic Czech guard. The iron-willed Anna is the natural protagonist, but her gender bars her from center stage, so the 15-year-old Emil becomes the designated survivor, a heavy burden for young shoulders. Anna commands him to escape. Free of the camp, he kills an old peasant for his clothes and travels to Prague, where he’s sheltered by Ctibor, his father’s old friend and (surprise) a decent gadjo. When he returns to rescue the rest of his family, he finds the camp deserted: they have all been shipped to Auschwitz. Emil’s primal howl of grief would have provided an appropriately bleak ending, but Doughty sends Emil back to Prague so he can reunite with Marie, another young Gypsy survivor of the camp. Their contrived reunion is just one element of a chaotic scene, as the German occupiers flee and the partisans hound them through the streets.
Doughty is a competent narrator, but her characters are dwarfed by the terrible times through which they move.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-057122-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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