The weird contrast of Christianity at its most murderous and India at its most sumptuous jars the senses as crime and...
The Inquisition visits on Portuguese Goa a great terror worthy of Josef Stalin, testing a fragile family to the limit.
Tiago Zarco, Zimler’s half-Jewish, half-Indian narrator, opens this rich, fast-moving story recalling the events that landed him in a prison dedicated to those the Inquisition has set aside for its special attention. Zarco, whose mother died shortly after the birth of his only sibling, Sofia, was fondly raised by his Portuguese-born Jewish father, an illustrator for a nearby Mogul price, and by Nupi, the Indian cook his mother salvaged from life as a beggar. As descendants of artist Berekiah Zarco, protagonist of Zimler’s 1998 The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Sofia and Tiago exhibit considerable graphic skills that their father has honed. But those refined talents are of no use at all when the family is caught in the virtuously sadistic grip of the Dominicans, betrayed by someone close to them. The most likely suspects are the awful Portuguese aunt Maria, wife of Tiago’s merchant uncle Isaac, a Christian convert; and Wadi, the Arab orphan adopted by Maria and Isaac. Maria detests her husband’s Jewish background and family, and handsome arrogant Wadi bears a long-held grudge against Tiago, possibly for spurning his adolescent love. Tiago’s father is the first victim of the holy terror, a prison suicide whose death was facilitated by his grieving son, the next to be imprisoned. Tiago, whose fiancée is pregnant, saves himself by professing Christianity, but his sentence to prison in Lisbon, rather than leading to the repentance desired by the Catholics, gives him time to construct a complex revenge against both his betrayer and the priest who sentenced him and his father. When he at last returns to Goa, he believes he knows whom he must punish, but he is compelled to have absolute proof.
The weird contrast of Christianity at its most murderous and India at its most sumptuous jars the senses as crime and punishment work their usual spell in this deeply absorbing work.Pub Date: July 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-33881-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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 writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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