by Paul West ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 30, 2001
The rhetoric is gorgeous, but the pace is too often funereal. Not, therefore, one of West’s real triumphs—but a failure that...
West’s 19th novel (after OK and Dry Danube, both 2000) painstakingly fictionalizes the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators led by Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up Parliament, and in the process murder England’s anti-Catholic King James I and his chief ministers.
West focuses initially (and, throughout, primarily) on Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest hidden in the home of Catholic noblewoman Anne Vaux, in one of the elaborate recesses (“priestholes”) designed and constructed by Little John Owen, a master of “deceptive carpentry” whose willingness to undertake such work presumably relates to his own dwarfish near-invisibility (he’s “a miniature freak . . . a gnome of the shadows”). The story stalls for much of its first hundred pages, as West roves through the cloistered thought processes of: Father Garnet (also troubled by unwelcome sexual imaginings), Lady Vaux, and Owen—as well as composer William Byrd, an acquaintance of Father Garnet’s, whose music gains him entry to Catholic and Anglican circles alike. Things pick up when events overtake ruminations, ending in the capture of several conspirators, while West broadens his focus to include “Guido” Fawkes himself (who, under torture, names names and implicates others), royalist aristocrat (and, in effect, Lord High Executioner) Sir Robert Cecil, and Machiavellian King’s Attorney Sir Edward Coke. And the tale rises to real eloquence in its rich closing pages, where Father Garnet agonizes over the relative claims of violence and inaction, and prepares himself to die. West’s love of the high style is well-suited to “the seething rot of Elizabethan and Jacobean society”; one wishes only that his (rather arch) omniscient narrator had reined in his tendencies toward elegant variation and superfluous commentary.
The rhetoric is gorgeous, but the pace is too often funereal. Not, therefore, one of West’s real triumphs—but a failure that many novelists might well envy.Pub Date: May 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-8112-1467-2
Page Count: 340
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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