A surprisingly touching investigation of motive, duty, and greed.
Honig’s debut novel explores the development and deterioration of Vladimir Putin's mind and morals.
Set in Russia a few decades in the future, Honig's novel introduces Nikolai Ilyich Sheremetev, the 24-hour nurse caring for the dementia-ridden former president. Sheremetev has lived his life as an honest man. However, when trouble in the family strikes and his nephew, Pasha, is arrested, Sheremetev mulls over the stakes of maintaining his high morals. While pondering how he might get his nephew out of jail, he learns that the entire staff at the dacha is greedily grabbing at dirty money. As time runs out both for Pasha’s release from jail and Putin’s moments of lucidity, Sheremetev wades his way through moral purgatory. Honig quietly and carefully crafts a tale about truth through time. Putin’s hallucinations are seamlessly intertwined with the present-tense narrative, braiding the past into the ex-president’s increasingly altered state of mind. Without justifying his autocratic brand of leadership, Honig humanizes Putin. “It was a terrible thing, dementia, a disease that struck at the very thing that made a person who he was.” However, what’s left of Putin oscillates between being a son fondly recalling his mother, a madman fighting the disembodied head of a Chechen, and the power-hungry politician he grew up to be. “The reason I was put in this place was to bring order to Russia...” he explains to a long-dead friend. His motives remain murky at best. “With one hand, I gave Russia order, and with the other I took for myself. It’s a fair trade.” Goroviev, a former journalist-turned-gardener, asks a pivotal question: “You wonder, a man who tells such lies…in the end, does he even know the truth himself?” Without any answers, Sheremetev is left to weigh the consequences of stealing from the biggest thief in Russia. Though Honig is a little heavy-handed with rhetorical questions, his study of what remains of a person once time takes its toll on the body and mind is a stunning take on the development of the corrupt and the corrupted.
A surprisingly touching investigation of motive, duty, and greed.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-156-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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