At times unwieldy but a harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma.
In the first novel available in English by the late Austrian writer Fritz (1948-2007), a woman faces her dark past when friends visit her in a mental hospital.
Set in Austria between 1945 and 1963, this poison cocktail of a novel swirls together painful personal histories and desperate hidden lives. A chauffeur named Wilhelm returns from the war to the city of Donaublau to marry Berta, keeping a promise made to a friend killed in battle. Berta’s friend Wilhelmine, a cleaning woman, eyes his arrival with suspicion and jealousy. Early on the novel reads like farce as the narrative clomps around in time; the misdirection doesn’t generate much mystery but pays dividends as events unfold. Things pick up when the action skips ahead 15 years to the day Wilhelm and Wilhelmine, now unhappily married, debate the best time to “pay Berta a visit and cheer her up” in the mental hospital. Fritz layers in much beauty and tragedy to show how Berta’s life was undone by grief, rancor from Wilhelmine, parenting two difficult kids, and “yearning for an ideal.” Fritz puts on a stylistic show, the prose dancing in West’s translation from camp to romance to psychological horror amid name games and wild monologues that often hide the truth. The title is Berta’s name for the evil in the world that will crush innocence out of her children. The climax is a moral challenge to readers: the book's most sympathetic character commits its most horrific act. In a caged hospital ward, Berta is befriended by a woman called Wise Little Mother, who intones bons mots like, “life is hope and hope is a wound,” with a logic as beguiling and twisted as that motivating the sane in the outside world.
At times unwieldy but a harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9897607-7-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Dorothy
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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