Rayner (Murder Book, 1997, etc.) captures the vaunting spirit of skyscrapers and their creators with delicacy and freshness....
An atmospheric, if ultimately overwrought, story of love and architecture in war-torn Finland and 1920s New York.
Esko Vaananen meets his true love, Katerina Malysheva, in 1901, when he is just 11. Her father, an embittered drunk and a fierce communist, is the Russian governor of the rural Finnish province where Esko lives. There’s only one phone in this remote village, yet the boy is entranced by the promise of modern architecture. Badly scarred and blind in one eye after a fire set by his mother before she killed herself, Esko dreams of creating buildings free from “the oppressive weight of the commitment to a useless past,” but he can’t liberate himself from his obsession with Katerina. Even though, by 1917, Esko is a rising young architect in Helsinki with no interest in politics, he becomes embroiled on the White side in Finland’s civil war to avenge Katerina’s abuse at the hands of Russia’s victorious Reds. Thinking she’s dead, Esko marries a female architect and begins to establish himself in Finland, but when he spots photographs by “Kate Malysheva” in Vanity Fair magazine, he embarks post-haste for America. There, he encounters Paul Mantilini, an Al Capone–like gangster who declares himself Esko’s blood brother after the Finn saves his life, and W.P. Kirby, an architect in the Frank Lloyd Wright school who teaches Esko that the pure, new style he strives for must be rooted in reality. “We’re trying to help people live,” Kirby says. “With harmony and a little grace. People, land, and building united.” Esko approaches this vision in a complex designed for Andrew MacCormick, a sort of Rockefeller millionaire who turns out to be Katerina’s husband. As the story reaches a melodramatic climax, even more improbable developments pile on thick and fast. Nonetheless, the author’s vivid renderings of wintry, pessimistic Finland and jazzy, anything-is-possible New York linger in the memory.
Rayner (Murder Book, 1997, etc.) captures the vaunting spirit of skyscrapers and their creators with delicacy and freshness. Too bad he fell back on hackneyed plot devices.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019634-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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