A fabulous cache of gold inspires a chamber symphony of greed and betrayal in contemporary Russia. Colonel Oleg Ivanovich Polyakov hasn't distinguished himself on his recent posting to Uzbekistan to meet legendary local gangster Pulat Usmanov, the godfather of Tashkent. Hours after arriving, he's spirited away by Usmanov, who's hidden $8.5 in gold bullion officially destined for Russia; then he's kidnapped, locked up, and put to work by Usmanov's enemies in Khiva loading the gold they're hijacking from him; finally he's slugged and hustled off back home by the minions of his own boss, General Viktor Petrovich Marchenko. But all these indignities are only a prelude to Polyakov's homecoming: Marchenko's KGB superior General Anatoli Nikolaevich Zorin, incensed that Polyakov's helped steal Usmanov's gold, abruptly strips him of his rank, his apartment, and his retirement benefits, and Polyakov realizes too late that he's been caught in a crossfire between Zorin, who's in league with Usmanov to keep the gold for the Uzbeks (and of course their special KGB friends), and Marchenko, who's bent on using the gold to finance the underground dealings of the Brotherhood. Things look better, but are actually worse, when Polyakov allows himself to fall back into the arms of his former KGB subordinate and lover, Maj. Natasha Trofimenka, whose father just celebrated his own retirement from the KGB by taking a fall from his tenth-floor apartment. Bent on identifying and punishing her father's killer, and easy prey for the promises of both Zorin and Marchenko, Trofimenka has no loyalty to spare for Polyakov. Once their alliances and positions have been staked out, Gowing's tiny cast do nothing but switch them, baiting each other with foolish ingenuity in their tireless determination to keep the gold away from Mother Russia. Gowing (The Wire, 1989) spins a series of double-crosses worthy of Len Deighton in this sorry tale of the same Old World Disorder.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13116-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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