by Paul West ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2000
The protean West's 18th novel (and second to appear this spring, following his revisionist Old West tale OK, p. 267) forms an interesting complement to his earlier fictional study of the Nazi phenomenon and its mentality, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980). Here, a `memoir` (the `author` of which is only gradually, glancingly revealed—as West's odd Afterword explains) describes the years (1907–14) when the young Adolf Hitler lived in Vienna as a hopeful art student. The specific subject is the importunate Adolf's courting of two older, established painters, Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, whose dismissive contempt for his productions (such as his `dry,` lifeless image of the Danube River) contributes significantly to the building resentment and that will later explode into military conquest and carnage. It's arguably reductive to thus pinpoint the source of Hitler's all-out assault on a European civilization that rejected his jejune contributions to it—but West's taut little immorality tale crackles with verbal energy, flexibility, and passion. One of his most fully realized fictions.
Pub Date: April 25, 2000
ISBN: 0-8112-1432-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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by Priya Parmar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 2015
Not exactly uncharted territory, but Parmar enters it with passion and precision, delivering a sensitive, superior soap...
A devoted, emotionally intense portrait of the Bloomsbury group focuses in particular on sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship is tested to the breaking point by their competing affections for two men.
Plunging into her story—the lives, love affairs, intellectual debates, arguments and achievements of an extensive, creative group of English friends—Parmar (Exit the Actress, 2011) allows the background facts about her real-life characters to emerge as needed. The curious, comfortably middle-class ménage of the four orphaned Stephen siblings—Adrian, Thoby, Vanessa and Virginia—living together in a large house in central London in the early 20th century is the foundation of the book. It’s in this house that Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and many others congregate for bohemian evenings. Bell falls in love with Vanessa; Strachey is a friend of Leonard Woolf, who will eventually return from the Colonies to marry Virginia. Narrated by Vanessa in diary format, punctuated, as if in a scrapbook, by letters, tickets, bills and postcards, this slice of fictional biography spans the years 1905-12, in particular the triangle that forms among Clive, Vanessa and her sister after the birth of the first Bell child. Vanessa, the artist, emerges as “an ocean of majestic calm,” almost infinitely tolerant of her sister, the writer, whose capricious, jealous nature, though tempered by intellectual brilliance and immense charm, tips over at times into madness and suicidal thoughts. This fictional Virginia is far less appealing than her sister, whose nuanced account of her shifting feelings for Clive and eventual love for another invites sympathy. Leonard Woolf’s arrival marks the beginning of the next episode in the group’s extraordinarily intertwined history.
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7637-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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by Clive Cussler & Justin Scott ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017
Despite an awkward transition or two and a bit of padding (there’s a recipe for Welsh rarebit), the Bell series hits the...
It’s No. 10 in the Cussler and Scott (The Gangster, 2016, etc.) series chronicling the adventures of rich man–sleuth Isaac Bell and the Van Dorn Detective Agency as the 20th century dawns.
It’s 1911, and Bell’s promised a Connecticut millionaire he’ll find his daughter, a young woman who left the lap of luxury and went missing among the wanna-be actors, money-grubbing producers, and crooked agents of New York City’s theater district. Bell finds her, but too late. The girl’s been murdered. Bell is distraught, angry, and now feels compelled to catch her killer. Soon Van Dorn’s research group unearths other murders with similar modus operandi—laid open with a large knife, up close and personal—from as far away as Jack the Ripper’s London to New York and to cities across the country as far as Los Angeles. Tracing the elusive killer, Bell forms a "Cutthroat Squad," a double-handful of tougher-than-nails Van Dorn detectives. Bell and squad soon figure out the murders are occurring wherever a touring theater group is presenting the play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The narrative makes stopovers at the Savile Club in Mayfair and NYC’s Knickerbocker Hotel, and as with nearly every Cussler tome, contemporary gadgetry—a Morkrum Printing Telegraph, an Atlantic 4-4-2 Deaver-built locomotive—adds authenticity to the period setting. It’s an action-packed, fast-moving, but not especially gory story, with pauses for Bell to use his fists or .45 or flaunt his wealth. Famous folk like Caruso make cameos, but Bell, an engrossing-enough meld of Dudley Do-Right and James Bond, and his cohort of detectives get their man.
Despite an awkward transition or two and a bit of padding (there’s a recipe for Welsh rarebit), the Bell series hits the right note for those who like crime fiction with a unique setting.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57560-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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