by Nicolas Barreau ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 24, 2012
A romp which, too soon, slows to a crawl.
A frothy exposé of the perils of book packaging, seasoned with a soupçon of culinary courtship.
In French-German author Barreau’s American debut, lovers of Paris and voyeurs of the French publishing scene will find much to relish. However, aficionados of tightly plotted romantic comedies will find considerably less. After being unceremoniously dumped by Claude, her boyfriend of two years, Aurélie Bredin, chef/owner of a charming restaurant on the Rue Princesse, drifts into an Île Saint-Louis bookstore to elude a nice gendarme who thought she was about to leap into the Seine. She espies a novel entitled The Smiles of Women, in French translation, by an English author, Robert Miller. Amazingly enough, the novel portrays a beautiful woman resembling Aurélie, and much of the action unfolds at Le Temps des Cerises—her restaurant. Her new infatuation with Robert Miller supplants her despair over Claude, and she resolves to meet the author, which poses a problem for Miller’s editor, André Chabanais, of Éditions Opale. Urged by his boss to scout and commission an “Englishman in Paris” project, André finds it easier just to write the thing himself. Collaborating with a British literary agent, Adam Goldberg, André invents a stereotypical English writer, an ink-stained, country-dwelling recluse. Adam’s dentist brother, Sam, agrees to pose for Robert Miller’s book-jacket photo, but now Opale’s marketing department is clamoring for Miller, who’s selling books in France like Ladurée sells macaroons, to make a Paris appearance for press interviews and a book signing. Worse, when Aurélie comes to his office in pursuit of Miller, André is smitten. To prevent exposure of his hoax, André, while trying to woo Aurélie himself, must answer her fan letters to Miller. But, what will happen when Miller, as impersonated by Sam, finally comes to town? The enjoyment of the deception is somewhat mitigated by the many talky scenes that pad the plot. The English translation exacerbates the ennui with flabby phrasing.
A romp which, too soon, slows to a crawl.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00670-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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