by Robert A. Rosenstone ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003
A fresh and fascinating debut that manages both to evoke the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Stalinist Russia and to put together...
A richly atmospheric first novel by film historian and biographer Rosenstone (Visions of the Past, 1995), who here concocts an apocryphal “last work” of the famous, doomed Russian author Isaac Babel.
A Jew from Odessa who fought with the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the 1917 revolution, Babel became celebrated in the 1920s for his short stories depicting life in the Soviet army and the Odessa underworld. Unwilling to crank out propaganda for the Writer’s Union in the 1930s, his reputation dropped quite precipitously, and in 1939 he was arrested and shot. Rosenstone picks up the story in 1936, when Babel is approached by a shadowy government functionary who asks him to arrange the escape of Lev Kamenev, a high Party official who’s about to be found guilty of treason and conspiracy. If Babel—who, on the basis of his writings, is widely believed to have underworld contacts in Odessa—can get Kamenev out of the country on the sly, he’ll be given a passport and allowed to rejoin his exiled wife and daughter in Paris. Babel can read the writing on the wall, so he agrees to help and heads off to his hometown on the Black Sea to set up the operation. Problem is, he doesn’t really have any “underworld contacts” in Odessa—that was all fiction. So he sets off on his own to cut a deal with the various sharpers and layabouts of the waterfront—who may or may not in reality be police spies. He also starts a love affair with the beautiful Mosfilm actress Nadja Kamenskaya—who may or may not be a police spy, too. In Stalin’s Russia, Kafka would seem like a realist, but Babel manages to keep a (black) sense of humor as he rushes in where angels (not to mention NKVD agents) might fear to tread.
A fresh and fascinating debut that manages both to evoke the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Stalinist Russia and to put together a pretty fair replica of Babel’s prose.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8101-1992-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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