A toothless, mildly entertaining read for lovers of Australia and expats.
In his memoir, a Frenchman-turned-Englishman recalls marrying an Australian girl and moving to the land Down Under, chronicling the first 365 days of his new life on the other side of the world.
On July 20, 2012—the dead of what passes for winter in Sydney—Vojetta (Opération Marie, 2013) offered his first post from the world’s biggest island. Thus begins the epistolary structure of this memoir—a single entry for each day, musing on the observed similarities and differences between Australia and the other countries he has called home. The Vojetta readers meet is a financial analyst–turned-writer who has published two previous books in French under the pseudonym Lawrence Tajevot. Vojetta, it seems, is most comfortable using an alias, so before two months of entries have elapsed, he has created a third-person version of himself named “Ollie,” in deference to Australians’ apparent love of abbreviations and acronyms. Ollie’s life in Sydney is a blessed one: He is entranced by the city’s seemingly eternal sunshine and outdoor sporting opportunities, and his pursuit of a new flat, a new car and frequent travel indicate that he has few financial worries. But his life also seems an oddly isolated one. Even a stranger in a strange land—particularly one who is married—will interact with other human beings from time to time, but Vojetta’s insistence on the third-person voice gives the impression that nearly all the observations and experiences are Ollie’s alone, companionless. Even his wife, who presumably accompanied him on most adventures, appears in the narrative only rarely (on Valentine’s Day, for instance. Perhaps because of this, an air of self-indulgence permeates Ollie’s entries—what might be a slightly inflated sense of the profundity of his observations or the wittiness of his wordplay. Ollie may also be overconfident in his English writing skills, which, while not deplorable, clearly indicate that he is not a native speaker: “But then, to follow grammar rules to the letter is perhaps even more important than simplicity. And this is why CEO’s (sic) tweeting is without doubt asking for trouble.”
A toothless, mildly entertaining read for lovers of Australia and expats.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-646-92090-0
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Blurb Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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