A haunting captor/prisoner love story set during the Japanese occupation of China, by the author of the story collection The Light of Home (1992). The year is 1938. Captain Kuroda is a reluctant and unskilled Japanese officer, a botanist by training, tormented by memories of the Nanking massacre: the squeals of children being killed, the smell of burning flesh, the dismembered bodies, the sight of a pregnant woman bayoneted in the abdomen, the ``constant rape.'' His army has moved on, leaving him the commander of a small garrison in the rolling hills of east-central China. When he comes upon his soldiers raping a filthy and starving woman, he intervenes for reasons he doesn't fully understand, and takes her under his protection. The daughter of a doctor, Li speaks Japanese; glad of the warmth of his quarters, she cooks for him but avoids his questions. Slowly, though, communication begins: He shows her a bamboo grove and talks about plants; she suggests that she should be his mistress. Isolated from his peers, Kuroda is renewed by this woman who seems to enjoy making love to him; she responds to how much he needs her and senses in him a trustworthiness in a world bereft of trust. As the lovers each realize the impossibility of a future, their attachment intensifies. Stabbed and dying, Kuroda tells of the horrors he's witnessed; Li holds him in her arms: ``I said he could forget it now, that I would remember.'' Using spare, unadorned prose, Binstock manages evocatively to juxtapose the occupying army's totalitarian cosmos, predicated on murder, rape, and the absolute lack of safety, with the tender realm temporarily created by these two damaged but deep-feeling lovers. A first novel unrelenting in its rendition of wartime cruelty, but tempered with a bracing reminder that deep human feelings can and will sprout from scorched earth.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-56947-038-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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