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MEMORY

Name: MEMORY
Author: Philippe Grimbert
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5999-3

by Philippe Grimbert & translated by Polly McLean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008

Memorable.

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A youth in postwar Paris discovers that his imaginary older brother is real.

Psychoanalyst Grimbert’s autobiographical novel was originally published in France as Un Secret. The young protagonist, Philippe Grimbert, is anguished by his spindly legs and barrel chest, especially compared to the flawless physiques of his parents: Tania, a champion diver and legendary beauty, and Maxime, a bodybuilder and former Paris playboy. Philippe believes that his parents weathered the Nazi occupation by vacationing in a bucolic village, Saint-Gaultier, as guests of a kindly colonel. He also believes he’s an only child. Early on, though, Philippe intuits a suppressed past. He was christened late for a Catholic child and his parents possess a samovar and a menorah. When he finds a toy dog in the attic, his parents display alarm, especially when he names it “Si.” Philippe invents an older brother who, unlike himself, is a schoolyard hero. He overhears rumors that his surname is really Grinberg. His adored father has always seemed vaguely disappointed in him, which Philippe chalks up to his weakling’s frame. When he is 15, he sees a documentary depicting horrific scenes from the Holocaust, and a family friend, Louise, feels compelled to tell Philippe the truth. We learn, along with Philippe, that his parents were each married before; Maxime to Hannah, daughter of a prosperous Lyonnais shopkeeper, and Tania to Hannah’s brother. Hannah and Maxime’s son Simon was everything Philippe imagined: athletic and handsome. Knowing that Maxime was obsessed with Tania, Hannah grew jealous and tragedy ensued. A sense of incipient dread, nimbly conveyed by McLean’s translation, pervades the novel. Although revelations are heavily foreshadowed, suspense is sustained by Philippe’s growing awareness of the fault lines running through his parents’ lives.

Memorable.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4165-5999-3

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.