A fine mess.
Balkan attitudes and American possibilities mingle successfully in a first novel picked from the slush pile.
Danilo Lazich was the death of his mother. Outsized at birth, the baby quickly outgrows the feeble control of his cobbler father and abandons the shoddy civilization of his Bosnian Serb birthplace for an outlaw life in the hills where, known to his superstitious neighbors as Vuk Hajduk, the wolf, terrorizing travelers and living off the land, he grows to enormous size and, most interestingly, enormous intellect and curiosity. Besting the police and the militia at every encounter, Lazich works his way to Vienna to become, briefly, bodyguard to the Empress Elizabeth, one of many superb character sketches Pavelich throws into this pleasingly undisciplined book. A return to the Balkan provinces results in marriage to Stoja, the incarnation of shrewd, hard-working, unforgiving, bad-tempered, passionate Slavic womanhood. The unloving couple flee to America, landing in New Orleans and hiking to Baton Rouge, where they catch a train for Butte, Montana. There, thousands of their compatriots and other immigrants work the richest lode of copper in a country busy wiring itself from coast to coast. Now known as Dan Savage, Lazich decides that digging is for suckers, but finds plenty of work as an enforcer until he gets the hang of the business and engineering ends of mining, and eventually moves his family to Wyoming, where huge amounts of coal lie waiting for the railroads. Angelene, the only child of the Savage marriage, presents Dan with an American grandchild Rade—Red—who will be truly New World, and Savage’s true companion in his old age. Pavelich starts and abandons a score of novels as he traces Savage’s life. Stoja, for example, plays the stock market successfully, but where the fortune goes is the reader’s guess. As is Angelene’s fate. Readers who can cope with the chaos will be rewarded with a very canny look at the process of Americanization.
A fine mess.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-023-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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