Bold, slashing view of the tiresome banality of evil.
A journalist decides to avenge one of the many atrocities he’s witnessed, in a third novel (Scar Tissue, 1994, etc.) by political commentator-historian Ignatieff (Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 2001, etc.).
There are few more clichéd characters than the seasoned war journalist—but few more compelling. Witness Charlie Johnson, the rough soul here. Charlie, who’s covered wars since Vietnam, has been based out of London of late, where he has a family that he never sees because he’s globetrotting to flashpoints with his rock-solid Polish cameraman Jacek. But Charlie gets set off when he and Jacek are trying to cover a story in Kosovo, circa 1998, and a Serb patrol comes through the village, setting fires. As Charlie and Jacek hide in a dugout, the woman who sheltered them is doused in gasoline and set on fire by the soldiers: “As she ran, her arms were like wings of flame, and she blundered into you in an embrace of fire.” Horribly burned himself, Charlie recuperates first under US Navy care, then at Jacek’s remote farmhouse—his wife’s phone calls going unanswered. Deeply scarred once too often by the memories of war, Charlie begins to harbor fantasies of revenge on the officer responsible for the woman’s death. When Charlie goes back to London, he acts out like a petulant teenager, playing the seasoned pro who has to explain nothing to anybody because he’s looked evil in the face and been marked forever. Ignatieff’s prose, which can tend toward the stiff, is best when describing Charlie in this self-righteous but resolutely unwise state of mind, formed by decades of violence: “It seemed obvious to him now that he had been left almost completely untouched by his life. Tired of it, perhaps, but untouched, as if it had all been just a very long action movie and no curtain.” Charlie’s return to the Balkans seems less a mission of justice than an acting-out of something he once saw in a movie.
Bold, slashing view of the tiresome banality of evil.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1755-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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