Beautifully written, sensual and seductive.
The exotic (and erotic) aura of Buenos Aires leads Daisy, the narrator, into some murky personal and sexual encounters.
Thirty-five and at the end of a nine-year marriage, Daisy is looking for escape from her aimless life. When a friend helps her get a grant to do a waterworks study project in Argentina, Daisy leaps at the opportunity provided—even though she has no technical knowledge about or understanding of hydraulics. Instead, she uses the money to rent a seedy apartment and finds herself neighbors with a handsome gay gigolo. Daisy also desultorily puts up an ad offering English-speaking lessons and through this offer makes contact with Leonarda, a charismatic and domineering woman who quickly takes Daisy under her wing. (Leonarda doesn’t even need English lessons but likes to consort with foreigners.) Also entering the volatile mix is Isolde, who’s come to Buenos Aires from Austria and who hopes to make it in the tony art circles of the city. Leonarda loves to play mind games and has developed a scheme—or rather a kind of living theatre production—she calls the Master Plan. This includes crashing parties, thrusting herself into both high and low society and seductively incorporating Daisy into her manipulation of men and sexual relationships. In about equal measure, Daisy finds herself sexually attracted to and morally repelled by Leonarda. When a threesome begins to spin out of control, Daisy takes some time off to go to Uruguay and reflect on...well, how things are spinning out of control. She eventually reaches an equilibrium rather than an understanding of the force of nature that is Leonarda.
Beautifully written, sensual and seductive.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-830-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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