An often captivating novel that explores a tender relationship between an older man haunted by his past and a college...
A heartfelt, harrowing novel about an unlikely friendship between a college hockey jock and an elderly Holocaust survivor.
Star hockey player Riley Hunter is failing his sociology class at the University of Minnesota, so his professor offers him an unusual extra-credit assignment. Although he’d much rather be on the ice, he begrudgingly agrees to serve as a companion for the elderly Jens Jaenisch, a reclusive and mysterious retired professor. It’s clear that Jens is hiding something, and as Riley attempts to uncover the mystery, he discovers he and the elderly man have more in common than he initially thought. Fridgen (Ruth 3:5, 2012) offers a compelling story within a story: As Riley grapples with an unyielding coach, an overbearing mother and a teammate’s devastating accident, Jens recounts his teenage years imprisoned in a concentration camp after he was caught kissing another man. At the camp, gays were known as “pinks,” after the pink triangles they had to wear on their uniforms, and were even lower on the totem pole than Jewish prisoners. Jens did anything he could to keep from being killed; providing sexual favors for soldiers and officers became routine, and Fridgen has Jens recount each encounter in sickening detail: “I have never forgotten his sounds and his taste,” Jens says, remembering when he was forced into oral sex on the train to Buchenwald. Throughout the novel, Jens’ recollections are gripping, grotesque and heartbreaking. In comparison, Riley’s far-less-interesting narrative feels, at times, like a bland movie-of-the-week. Also, the novel’s odd plot twists and often stilted dialogue (“I just do not want you to be awkward around me, and I feel bad that I wasn’t honest with you”) can be unconvincing. Overall, however, it remains an engrossing story of two very different men overcoming their struggles together.
An often captivating novel that explores a tender relationship between an older man haunted by his past and a college athlete unsure about his future.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615992693
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Dreamlly Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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