A 1992 Booker Prize finalist, this gothic sixth novel by a London author, poet, and playwright (The Visitation—not reviewed) plumbs the dark secrets left in a villa in Normandy by the Nazi officers who were once billeted there. Twenty years ago, during the French Occupation of WW II, ascetic Antoinette Martin of Normandy became pregnant and was forced to give up her dream of becoming a nun. She married a local low-born admirer and gave birth to a girl, ThÇräse; soon after, Antoinette's widowed sister, Madeleine, returned to the villa with her own young daughter, LÇonie, to keep Antoinette company. Cousins ThÇräse and LÇonie, who disliked each other instantly, struggled through their postwar childhoods in an uneasy truce, aware but not aware that in the depths of the old villa lived a secret they were forbidden to uncover. As the girls approached puberty, Antoinette died of breast cancer; Madeleine made a bid to marry her sister's widower; and ThÇräse and LÇonie learned that a Jewish family hidden by the Martins during the war were betrayed by one of the villagers and murdered in the nearby forest. The Catholic cousins' reaction to this horrifying news was to witness the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary on the very spot where the Jews were killed. Soon, spiritually ambitious ThÇräse learned to use her visions to secure herself a place in a convent, while LÇonie gave up on spiritualism altogether and threw herself into a life of sensuality. The final discovery—that Antoinette may have been impregnated by the man who betrayed the Jews, and that the cousins may actually be the twin offsprings of that act—separated ThÇräse and LÇonie for 20 years- -until the burden of their secret brings ThÇräse home to complete their story. Breathless and sinister but frustratingly opaque: the power of Roberts's novel lies in what remains unsaid.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-04610-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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 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
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