A spare and meditative story that captures the long aftereffects of tragedy.
A childhood prank gone wrong prompts one man’s reckoning with his family’s Holocaust history in this recursive, astringent novel, the author’s first published in English.
The narrator of Laub’s fifth novel is a middle-aged Brazilian man who’s on his third marriage, courting alcoholism and caring for his father, who’s just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. But he’s preoccupied as much with the past as the present, particularly his complicity in an incident that occurred when he was 13: He and his friends let a classmate fall to the ground during the last of the traditional “birthday bumps,” leaving him badly injured. That moment is the keyhole through which the narrator considers his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and the emotional weight of the death camps. (The narrator had just been bar mitzvahed when the incident occurred, so his Jewish heritage was top-of-mind.) Grandfather kept a series of notebooks after escaping Auschwitz and moving to Brazil, but the atrocity is absent from its pages, though sublimated into obsessive scribbling about hygiene. This slim study of the difficulty of facing past horrors is mirrored in the cracked quality of the narrative: Each section is splintered into paragraph-long minichapters that offer glimpses of the narrator’s fights with his father, his regrets over the bullied and wounded schoolmate, his grandfather’s decline and the limitations of Holocaust memoirs. (Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man is a particular focus.) The overall mood of the novel is understandably tragic and soaked in regret: The narrator, like his father and grandfather before him, is trying and failing to come to grips with atrocity in his writing. But the closing pages here carry a sense that recovery and forgiveness may be possible, if hard-won.
A spare and meditative story that captures the long aftereffects of tragedy.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59051-651-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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