Shaham, winner of last year's National Jewish Book Award for The Rosendorf Quartet, organizes this ambitious new novel around the figure of a Marxist revolutionary suddenly struggling in his old age to come to terms with his part in the upheavals he has survived. Avigdor Berkov begins clearly enough with the facts of his life. He was born in Czarist Russia, left it for Palestine in the heady 1920's to work in the Labor Brigade, fathered a son on his girlfriend, but returned to Soviet Russia when his leftist positions led to his expulsion from the Brigade. Back in his homeland, he had time to settle down with a wife, Nina, and a daughter, Olga, before Stalin's infernal machine captured him and abandoned him to interrogation, torture, and a long prison term. Now, in 1970, his trip to Olga in Tel Aviv—where he'll see Vera and her son as well—forces him to reconstruct himself, and his justification for choosing political causes over family, friends, and lovers, through a shattered mosaic of memories. As in The Rosendorf Quartet, a series of narratives (here, four notebooks Berkov keeps on his arrival in Israel) dramatize increasingly powerful episodes in the principals' lives without, finally, giving the labyrinth a center. Berkov recalls his hopeful friendship with Crimean utopian Mendel Elkind, his casual betrayal of a harmless Israeli intellectual, his suspicions of the Polish editor whose desire for Nina led him to produce a forged death certificate for Berkov—all the time trying to explain himself in the present to an avid student of the Labor Brigade's infighting, a documentary filmmaker, his dismissive son-in-law, and his companions in the nursing home where he ends up. Despite Shaham's resolute understatement (``It is melodrama which I want to avoid above all,'' Berkov says early on): a memorable portrait of a survivor of himself, a man whose own actions, and whose continuing detachment from them, have branded him as indelibly as the Holocaust scarred its survivors.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1001-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
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