Lively, illuminatingly exotic and richly told tale of life during wartime.
Groves’ debut historical novel, set in mid–20th-century Japan, is a well-tempered story of cultural dislocation, the ruin of war and faith in love.
The author has created an epic here, but it is of the intimate rather than the sprawling variety. The book opens in the 1930s when a young man, Jiro, is sent to San Francisco on a work-study program to learn the American end of his family’s silk business. The story moves back and forth between those months in the United States and Jiro’s life in Kyoto, two very different experiences. As Japan invades China and a more expansive war looms, the book illuminates the importance of gardens in Japan, as well as bathing rituals and fried squid. Despite being minutely plotted, the narrative offers many unforced insights into Japanese culture, drawing some fiercely dark moments and cushioning others with light humor: “Its driver was sitting on the front, oblivious to the uplifted tail of his one-horsepower machine and the straw-filled remains of the day the swaybacked nag was depositing on the pavement.” When Jiro becomes a fighter pilot, the novel offers readers an entertaining tour of the Zero aircraft, later describing in stunning detail the action of aerial dogfights. With equal flair, the author draws a lovely wedding and outlines the workings of sericulture. There is much death and intolerance here, but readers will find balance in Jiro, whose proud Japanese personality is slightly beveled by his Western sojourn. In the end, Jiro does not rue surviving the war; others who chose suicide didn’t realize that “the Americans weren’t going to invade Japan, just occupy her. This meant they would not rape and kill their women, just marry them.”
Lively, illuminatingly exotic and richly told tale of life during wartime.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 9781604819120
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Wordclay
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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