No perfect ending, but enough redemption and hope make this a quiet celebration of survival.
Bonds forged in Auschwitz help a young mother caught in the Intifada to survive—in a scrupulously fair-minded and riveting tale of current Israel.
A deft mix of past and present, the story’s as much political thriller as conventional tale about the ties of family and friendship. The representative cast of characters here includes journalists, Saudi Arabians, Palestinians, and Jewish settlers, as well as members of Hamas. Herself a long-time resident of Israel, Ragen (Chains Around the Grass, 2002, etc.) is putting the case for that country, but she does it with considerable sensitivity. Things begin in 2002 with American-born Elise, confined to bed because of a difficult second pregnancy, relying on her oncologist husband Jonathan to take their daughter, five-year-old Ilana, to day-care. The Margulieses live in one of the controversial settlements, and Jonathan must pass through dangerous Palestinian-held areas on his way to the hospital, where he takes care of both Palestinians and Jews. Later that day, homeward-bound with Ilana, his car is ambushed and the two disappear. Elise, in shock at the news, is rushed to hospital. When Leah, Elise’s grandmother and a Holocaust survivor, learns in New York what’s happened, she flies to Israel, but not before contacting the three other women who swore an oath—a covenant—to help one another survive Auschwitz. The three—Esther, a cosmetics mogul, who lives in California; Ariana, who owns a famous nightclub in Paris; and Maria, a Polish Catholic—immediately rally round: Esther contacts her granddaughter, who’s married to a Saudi with contacts in high places; Ariana uses her club sources to compromise a Hamas leader; and Maria sends her grandson Milos to Israel, where he befriends Julia, a Palestinian sympathizer and TV journalist, who unknowingly has contacts involved in dangerous pursuits.
No perfect ending, but enough redemption and hope make this a quiet celebration of survival.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-29119-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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