With Ilse as unblinking guide, Charlesworth travels the morally ambiguous alleyways of war to create a deeply satisfying if...
More Empire of the Sun than The Painted Bird, British author Charlesworth’s fourth (Glass House, 1987, etc.), based on her mother’s history, follows a half-Jewish German girl’s travails during WWII after her mother’s arrangements for her to leave Germany go awry.
It’s 1939 when Ilse arrives in Morocco to stay with her uncle Willie. Her father Otto, a Jewish Communist, has stayed in Germany on principle to resist the Nazis while Ilse’s mother Lore is supposedly saving money for her own passage. When Willie joins the French Foreign Legion to fight Hitler, Ilse is sent to Paris, expecting to find both parents. Only Otto shows up. Lore doesn't come. Instead, sending papers that erase Ilse’s Jewish heritage, she asks the girl to return to Germany, where, as an Aryan, she will now supposedly be safe. Otto feels betrayed by Lore, who used Ilse to get him to leave Germany for his own safety. Ilse is torn between loyal obedience to her father, whose lack of past attention she resents, and yearning for her mother, whose maternal love she never doubts. Ultimately, Ilse stays with Otto. As Paris falls, they make their way south, helped along the way by the romantic if shadowy resistance fighter Francois, a Polish Jew whose personal mission becomes keeping Ilse safe over the next four years. Ilse and Otto end up in Marseilles, where a well-connected madam protects them—until the Germans capture Otto. Ilse’s ambivalence toward her father, a hero in the eyes of the world but a man riddled with human imperfection, is particularly moving. Meanwhile, during the bombing of Hamburg, Lore dies while saving her employer’s son, a Hitler Youth member who secretly performs small acts of anti-fascism. Ilse grows from a passive child, observing events, into an active participant, driven by the same mixed motives as everyone else.
With Ilse as unblinking guide, Charlesworth travels the morally ambiguous alleyways of war to create a deeply satisfying if unsettling read full of richly complicated characters.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4009-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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