A brutal, cinematic tale of mass murder.
In this debut novel of the Armenian genocide, ethnic cleansing nearly annihilates two close-knit families.
The Elmassians and the Bedrosians live in Bayburt, Turkey, in the early 20th century. The respective families of patriarchs Bedros Elmassian and Megerdich Bedrosian are united by longtime friendship and, later, marriage when Megerdich’s youngest son, Papken, marries Bedros’ daughter, Emma. The governor of Bayburt, Muhammad Kasaba, attends their wedding; he’s a Turkish Muslim and the Elmassians and Bedrosians are Armenian Christians. The relationship between Muhammad and these two Armenian families is notable in a time when misconceptions about Armenian Christians brew resentment in the Ottoman Empire: “We have to perform five years of military service. The Armenians pay a tax and avoid serving at all. While we’re off defending Turkey, they take advantage of our absence to gain control of agriculture and trade.”(At the start of this novel, it’s noted that “all able-bodied Armenian men were conscripted into service last year.”) This resentment results in the murder of an important family figure early on, and also in a governmental order that all Armenians be deported from Bayburt. This sets off a series of horrors that results in the murders of many Armenians, and Bosland doesn’t spare readers the brutality of the events at hand. Rosmerta Bedrosian, the daughter of Megerdich, emerges as the story’s central figure as the gruesome cruelty around her makes it increasingly challenging for her to heed her father’s injunction: “Do what you must to survive. When there is life, there is hope.” The author makes sure that this does not come off as a contrived moment of sentimentality; the words echo in Rosmerta’s mind as she witnesses rape, the deaths of infants, rampant disease, and many other forms of suffering—effectively revealing to readers the challenge of finding hope, or even the will to live, when faced with genocide. But as Bosland highlights in an epigraph and in his author’s note, it’s essential to chronicle such terrible things: “Failure to remember the Armenian Genocide for what it was made it difficult for the world to recognize what was happening in Germany during World War II.”
A brutal, cinematic tale of mass murder.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73416-621-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Read All Over Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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