by Richard Grant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2006
A pretentious farrago.
A back-to-nature youth festival in Weimar Germany and a dangerous WWII guerilla mission in Central Europe provide the backdrop for this restless, convoluted novel from Grant (Kaspian Lost, 1999, etc.).
Though it opens in 1944 and then proceeds through awkward flashbacks, the story really begins in the summer of 1929, when friends and neighbors Ingo Miller and Martina (Marty) Panich are young college students in Washington, D.C. Ingo (German-American) and Marty (nominally Jewish) attend that youth festival in the idyllic German countryside. The attendees, who range from Communists to anti-Semitic rightists, celebrate the German “folk-soul” and homoerotic sentiments. Ingo will fall in love with a German lad; Marty will be deflowered by a supercilious American journalist, Samuel Butler Randolph III. In a move that’s crucial for the plot, Ingo will rescue an American Jewish kid, Isaac, from right-wing bullies; the flawlessly beautiful Hagen, a devious rightist, will lead the Americans to apparent safety. Fifteen years later, the enigmatic and underdeveloped Isaac is a guerilla leader in the mountains on the Czech/Polish border; the Little Fox is legendary for his attacks on the SS. Word reaches Ingo and Marty in Washington that Isaac possesses an invaluable document, Himmler’s order to eradicate the Jews; he will hand it over, but only to Ingo. An unlikely ragtag band of “desk warriors,” including Ingo and Marty, leave for Europe after basic training in Maryland. Yet there’s no suspense here. The mission to obtain the document is interrupted, not only by flashbacks but also by reports from Butler, a loyal Communist; he is embedded with the Red Army and under orders to obtain and destroy that all-important directive. Another impediment to a fast-moving narrative is the author’s fanciful commentary (“the lustral agonies of the Third Reich were only the fall of the House of Burgundy all over again”). The key players (Ingo, Isaac, Butler and Hagen, now an SS officer) will converge in a bloody climax weighed down by references to Macbeth and Clausewitz.
A pretentious farrago.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26359-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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