A less-than-thrilling takeoff on the Kennedy murders.
The new novel by Bond (The Doorstep of Depravity, 2005, etc.) looks at the Kennedy assassinations through the eyes of an unsuspecting witness to conspiracy.
It’s the summer of 1963. Cajun ingénue Bones LeBeau arrives in New Orleans and lands a waitress job at a seedy restaurant where a clique of underworld-type figures known to her only by their first names holds court in the back room. Bones and her co-worker Tina keep busy in back serving food and playing strip dice-rolling games for the entertainment of the regulars and their guests, including a gentlemanly singer they call Mr. Frank. But she occasionally overhears their unsettling table talk about Cuba, “The Company,” “Norma Jean” and a certain objectionable public servant; her innocent suggestion that they get said official fired sparks a malevolent glimmer in their eyes. Drifting to Dallas, Bones works at a strip club belonging to one Mr. Jack, brings hamburgers to a group of men who discuss rifles in French and picks up on veiled talk of hypnosis; come November 22, she starts to discern a monstrous plan amid these disjointed observations. The author steeps Bones’ story in atmospheric settings and punchy dialogue, and Kennedy assassination mavens will enjoy spotting various figures and plot shards from prominent conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the heroine’s naïve ramble through history is so perfunctory that no suspense builds while we wait for the opaque conversations and low-key encounters to gel into the tragedy we know is coming. (An explanatory appendix by a fictional KGB operative makes the conspiracy vaster and more confusing, but no more exciting.) Then, in a subplot set in ’68, two random people are clued in by Bones’ taped reminiscences to a looming conspiracy against Bobby Kennedy and face this dilemma: should they race to California to thwart another assassination, or should they just sit around until it unfolds in front of them on TV? Stymied by his characters’ passivity, Bond tries to juice things up with drawn-out striptease scenes, but even these are so good-natured and prim that our pulses stay rock steady.
A less-than-thrilling takeoff on the Kennedy murders.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0967355122
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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