Debates about empires and lavish depictions of culture bring moments of relief in a haunting drama that reflects a Federico...
A historical novel continues the story of Col. Alejandro Luis De La Voca Rivera, a swashbuckling military hero stationed in colonial New Spain.
The time frame for Diaz’s (Shadows Under the Sun, 2016) sequel is never specifically stated, but the action takes place during the period of Spain’s rule over what is today Mexico and New Mexico. Albuquerque and Santa Fe are already established outposts, governed by an elite class that traces its roots to the Iberian Peninsula. As the tale opens, Alejandro has just arrived in the Yucatán town of Campeche, having traveled from Santa Fe in part to deliver a package of correspondence to the beautiful young widow Maria Angela Alvarez Candelaria from her brother. Alejandro and Angela were once engaged; now their romance is rekindled. The story follows the couple during their first few years of marriage while they are living in Mexico and on their subsequent journey back to Spain to spend time at Alejandro’s ancestral home. In Madrid, Angela is presented to the king and queen and learns that her husband is a marquis, quite popular with the royal family (“Her mind raced with the day’s wonderful memories. There was the grand palace with servants everywhere…lunch and countless hours of discourse with the most noble of nobles. She had also discovered that she was a noble woman by marriage and now felt silly at having repeated over and over during the walk back, ‘Marquesa de Carzola’ ”). Unfortunately, she becomes so enchanted with frivolous palace life that she is diminished as a three-dimensional character, losing the depth and compassion that made her so charming in the first volume and the earlier half of this one. Diaz also introduces an element of mysticism to this installment. Alejandro’s adopted daughter delivers a grim prophecy, resulting in a pervasive sense of melancholy that leaches joy from the second half of the narrative. As he did in his earlier work, the author frequently juxtaposes the colonel’s fierceness in combat with his innate tenderness, sense of justice, loyalty toward his men, deep religious convictions, and concern for the poor and needy. Diaz fills the adventure with bloody battles, political intrigue, schemes, and revenge.
Debates about empires and lavish depictions of culture bring moments of relief in a haunting drama that reflects a Federico García Lorca-esque focus on life’s inevitable tragedies.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-4800-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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