Anselmo debuts with an almost existential take on the quotidian stress endured by US Marines in strife-torn Lebanon when they were deployed there on a disastrous peace-keeping mission in the early '80s. At the heart of the spare narrative (whose characters have neither first names nor defining pasts) is Cazetti, a free-spirited corporal working as a combat photographer (a.k.a. duty-flick) for an intelligence unit. Although based in the trench community ringing Beirut's seaside airport, he and his superiors spend a lot of their time in the hostile interior trying to make sense of the local militias (Amal, Druze, Mourabitoune, Phalangist, et al.) that have been assaulting one another in the wake of an invasion mounted by Israel to purge its Arab neighbor of the PLO. When a shifty warlord in the pay of S-2 is unable to provide authoritative information on the intentions of regional forces, the randy French- speaking Cazetti is dispatched to a mountainside monastery to observe and record troop movements. On this post, he makes a determined pass at a lovely young nun who spurns him and vows to pray for him. The unrepentant two-striper returns to his buddies and winds up in a drunken brawl that costs him 30 days in an offshore brig and a bust to private. Back from his shipboard sojourn, Cazetti reports to a new captain who assigns him to a line company. Having survived a couple of inauspicious firefights, he's summoned back to his intelligence outfit in time for a climactic offensive. Cazetti goes down for the last time at the height of a mortar barrage on leatherneck positions. Though flawed by the author's I-am-a-camera approach to storytelling, this short tale of Cazetti's final post provides a vivid grunt's-eye view of what it's like to be caught in the crossfire of battlefields far from home.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-101209-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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