Another perfect little novel of manners from the ever-wondrous Spark (Aiding and Abetting, 2001, etc.): a microcosm of the...
At 82, Dame Spark brings yet again a brimming supply of wit, drollery, understatement, and plain human interest to a tale—this one about changing sexual alliances in a tiny private school in Europe.
Rowland Mahler, 29, and his wife, Nina Parker, 26, are the founders, managers, and faculty of College Sunrise, the little school that from time to time they move from one European location to another, partly for cachet but partly for the convenience of leaving certain debts behind. Right now, the school has nine students, aged sixteen and up, each supported by well-off parents and each made touching, memorable, or amusing by the merest stroke or two of the Sparkian brush. Still, as Nina teaches her “Etiquette” course and Rowland carries on with his popular creative writing class (one reason for creating College Sunrise was so Rowland could write a novel), one student does come more to the forefront, and that’s Chris Wiley, only 18 but—troublingly indeed for the increasingly envious Rowland—visibly gifted as a writer. Worse than just being talented, Chris, unlike the badly blocked Rowland, is cruising right along with his own first novel—on Mary, Queen of Scots—and even getting some attention from publishers and movie people, fickle as they may prove to be. As the school year moves forward amid various perfections of detail, atmosphere, and event—field trips, fashion shows, hotel dances, sometimes even classes—the real story lies in Rowland’s obsessive envy of Chris and his jealousy-induced breakdown (Rowland actually stays at a monastery for a bit, trying to recover), events followed by one delicately done twist after another as a marriage fails, another comes about, and the Chris–Rowland “problem” is resolved in a most unexpected way.
Another perfect little novel of manners from the ever-wondrous Spark (Aiding and Abetting, 2001, etc.): a microcosm of the world we live in, constructed with wizardry, delicacy, sharp eye, and huge heart.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51282-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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