A fictional soufflé: airy and insubstantial, but really rather sweet.
Dark doings in Paris in 1887 as engineer Gustave Eiffel supervises construction of his Tower.
French author Bleys’s fourth novel, winner of the Prix du Roman Historique, focuses initially on two Eiffel employees: Parisian bon vivant Odilon Cheyne and ingenuous provincial “hick” Armand Boissier. The two become devoted friends (and are labeled “the twins”) at work and at play—and Odilon leads the starry-eyed Armand to a “spiritualist society” led by clairvoyant Apolline Sérafon (to whom Cheyne is secretly married). Through these new friends Armand meets and falls for stunning young actress Roseline Page. All seems bliss—until scheming American engineer Gordon Hole, jealous of Eiffel’s increasing celebrity and sworn to ruin him, engages drug-addicted layabout Gaspard Louchon as his henchman in a plot that also involves a lissome ventriloquist named Salome. Roseline is kidnapped and her death counterfeited, and the suggestible Armand is persuaded that Eiffel had stolen (Roseline’s father) Gordon Hole’s conception—and that it is Armand’s duty to prevent the Tower’s completion. An attempt on the partially finished structure is abandoned when Armand encounters a “luminous shape” that he interprets to be Roseline’s ghost. These not-unentertaining absurdities proliferate blithely, reaching a climax somewhat delayed while Bleys laboriously displays the fruits of his evidently exhaustive researches. The villainous Gordon Hole (and what a pity it is Peter Sellers isn’t around to portray him), a Francophobe of gargantuan proportions, deviously masters the art of French cooking, posing as a chef at the Exhibition where the Tower will open to the public. And the cavalry (consisting of “the twins” and their respective beloveds) arrives just in whatever is the Gallic equivalent of the nick of time. Bleys is clearly enjoying himself, and readers who don’t take this nonsense seriously may do the same.
A fictional soufflé: airy and insubstantial, but really rather sweet.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7145-3094-8
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
I loved it — and to my mind — it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, — the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best. Once again, as in Tortilla Flat, he makes no effort to stress "social significance". To be sure, one can strain at his underlying meanings and say that such people should not exist in today's plenty — but no one can argue that they wouldn't exist again tomorrow if eliminated today. Flotsam and jetsam of humanity, — the gang of boys who could get jobs but didn't except when emergency demanded — and then quit when the emergency passed. Lee's felicitous acquiescence to their thinly veiled urging that they become caretakers of his newly acquired shack; their neighbors in the deserted lot; Doc, high mogul of the marine laboratory, doctor to the neighborhood on occasion, beloved by all; and the others who made up the dregs of Cannery Row. The story builds up to first one and then another climax, as the boys plan a party for Doc. There's humor — and pathos — and sheer good story telling as the incidents unfold. The plot is tenuous, held together by the characters. But Steinbeck succeeds in making them human, likable, out of drawing but never in caricature. And one feels that to him, too, they are part of the flavor of a folk legend of today.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1944
ISBN: 0140187375
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1944
Novelist/historian Carr (The Devil's Soldier, 1991, etc.) combines his two preferred modes with a meaty, if overslung, serial- killer quest set in 1896 New York. A series of gruesome murders and mutilations of heartrendingly young prostitutes—boys dressed as girls—reunites three alumni of William James' pioneering Harvard psychology lectures: Times reporter John Schuyler Moore, eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (called, after the fashion of the time, an ``alienist''), and New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Despite Moore's skepticism about Roosevelt's plan to put Kreizler on the case (``You'd be better off hiring an African witch doctor,'' he says about his old friend), Kreizler steadily compiles a profile of the killer based on a combination of forensic and psychological evidence. The man they're looking for is over six feet tall; about 30 years old; an expert mountaineer; either a priest or a man from a strongly religious background; a veteran of some time among Indians. As Moore tours Manhattan's nastiest nightspots and Kreizler's net closes around a suspect, Carr fills out his narrative with obligatory cameos by Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, J.P. Morgan, Anthony Comstock, and Franz Boas, and didactic digressions on the rise of Bertillon measurements, fingerprints, the Census Bureau, and gourmet dining (courtesy of Delmonico's) in America. The result is somehow gripping yet lifeless, as evocative period detail jostles with a cast of characters who are, for the most part, as pallid as the murder victims. Still, it must be said that the motivation of the demented killer is worked out with chilling, pitying conviction. Unremarkable as a genre thriller, then, but highly satisfactory as fictionalized social history. (Film rights to Paramount; Literary Guild Alternate Selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41779-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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