Winner of the 1992 Kleist Prize, the latest novel from Maron (Flight of Ashes, 1986, etc.) continues to probe the grim, repressed world of East Germany under Communist domination, this time from the perspective of a battered survivor. Rosa Polkowski has fallen on hard times in East Berlin—thanks to her decision not to continue in her pointless job as a researcher of fledgling Communist states in post-WW I Germany—when she meets an old man in a cafÇ whom she recognizes as one of the former Communist elite. In spite of her revulsion toward Professor Beerenbaum and what he represents, Rose is unable to reject his offer of employment as the transcriber of his memoirs. Coming to his fashionable home on a regular basis, she performs her task without comment—until a visitor unleashes Rosa's pent-up rage by agreeing with him that the Wall is an unfortunate necessity. Later, in order to contradict his honeyed reminiscences, she confronts him with a sordid memory that he would rather forget—the fact that he sent one of his junior colleagues at the university, now a friend of Rosa's, to prison for mailing a manuscript to the West—and sends the old man into a fit from which he never recovers. She attends his funeral feeling both duty-bound and vastly relieved, and is shunned by the family, but she receives from them the Professor's manuscript, as the troubled but true heir-apparent of his damning past. Relentlessly somber, rife with ambiguity, and with the day of the funeral used as a recurring theme, this is a bleak, biting reminder that the old Communist order has fallen but that its long shadow remains.
Pub Date: May 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-930523-93-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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