Erratic, often lyrically overpowering, bountifully imagined. This isn’t the Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one...
Strong echoes of Aleichem and Singer sound throughout this ambitious first novel, a piecemeal portrayal of a Jewish family in Europe, the Holy Land, and America from the 1830s to the present day.
The dual narrative is initially awkward: brief factual summaries (under the heading “My Father Writes”) offer capsule versions of longer stories told by a narrator eventually identified as “Nomi.” There follows a rich parade of colorful characters and dramatic incidents: some lavishly developed, others quickly sketched, many given a pronounced magical-realist coloring. Eve begins in Jerusalem with the figures of Rabbi Yochanan Schine and his adulterous wife Esther, then moves on (back and forth among Russia, Jerusalem’s Old and New Cities, and several other key locations)—in a manner that sometimes seems as haphazard as it is chronological and calculated—to focus successively on the happy marriage of “Avra the Thief” and her husband Shimon, an orchard worker in the village of Petach Tikvah (“the citrus-growing center of the Jewish Settlement”); the contrasting fates of their twin sons Zohar and Moshe, growing up during the flowering of Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1920s; the suspected murder, in 1851, of an esteemed ancestor; Zohar’s wife Miriam the seamstress, who “sews” stories both real and imaginary into the garments she creates; their participation in an underground illegal immigration movement during the (1940s) British Mandate in Palestine—an activity mocked by the “disappearance” of their deformed, in effect discarded youngest son Gabriel; and the dream-haunted, “uprooted” life of Gabriel’s brother (and narrator Nomi’s father) Eliezer, in Jerusalem and America. The metaphor of grafting is employed (and explained, in a concluding “manual of orchard terms”) to describe how this novel separates, splices, and otherwise connects the individual stories—even while acknowledging the ultimate mystery and unknowability (“Family chronology defies consciousness”) of the souls herein both preserved in memory and lost to history.
Erratic, often lyrically overpowering, bountifully imagined. This isn’t the Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one suspects Eve may yet be capable of producing it.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41076-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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