Mexican history again serves as a backdrop for Zollinger (Not of War Only, 1994), this time in an ambitious story of the French imperial adventure of the 1860s. Having left the US Army after the Mexican War and joined the famous French Foreign Legion, Captain Jason James is back in Mexico to prepare the way for Napoleon III's establishment of a Catholic empire in Central America with the Austrian Prince, Maximilian, on the throne. The valiant, handsome James must face ghosts from the past, most notably a death threat from a cousin who, like the US, is conveniently distracted by the American Civil War. Meanwhile, Sarah Anderson, beautiful, Boston-bred, and French-educated, also arrives in Mexico to handle the affairs of her murdered brother. Joined by American Marine Lieutenant Matt O'Leary and Cipi, a dwarf gifted with prophecy, among other soldiers and servants, the pair becomes enmeshed in the politics of France's adventure in Mexico. Both Jason and Sarah are expatriate Americans, but each is also faced with divided loyalties: Sarah is friend to Maximilian's consort, Carlotta, yet develops an affinity for Benito Juarez and his revolutionaries; and when Jason becomes a colonel in the Mexican Imperial Army, he's divided between sworn duty and deep commitments to his native democratic principles. Falling in love, the two wrestle through their conflicts against the background of a Mexico ripped apart by internal politics and bloody warfare; not only will their love last, but because of their social and political connections, they'll find themselves on hand for most of the important events in the short, tragic rein of Maximilian I. Few of the characters ever really come to life, and Zollinger's dialogue is bitten to death by anachronisms (``jettison,'' ``completely looney''); but the story is romantic and the history is real, giving a pull to this blood-and-dust tale of mid-19th-century politics south of the border.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85530-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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