Littell’s mordent wit is perfectly suited to his melancholy tale, rich in dark imagery and razor-sharp dialogue.
From the reminiscences of four worldly women emerges a vivid portrait of the life and times of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Secrets play little part in this latest from esteemed espionage author Littell. Rather than spin a tale of clandestine agents, Littell fashions an extended dialogue among four blatantly forthright witnesses to history. As a premise, Littell opens with one R. Litzky, once “a young American…Moscow State University [student]…minoring in Fatal Flaws of Capitalism” and now an 86-year-old man living in Brooklyn Heights. Litzky stumbles upon a cache of tapes he recorded more than 60 years ago in which four women recall their relationships with idolized poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. (Mayakovsky and the women are all based on actual people.) Litzky says the women tell “the butt-naked truth,” and he means it. As Mayakovsky “couldn’t decide which was more important to consummate: erections, poetry, or revolution,” the transcribed tapes are akin to an R-rated version of All About Eve with the four ex-lovers sniping over the primacy of their passionate affairs and relationships with the poet. In a comment intended not “as a compliment, only a description,” Nora Polonskaya, a “foul-mouthed blonde theater actress,” calls Lilya Yuryevna, Mayakovsky’s muse, “an epicurean at the table of carnal love.” Besides bedrooms grand and fetid, Littell’s mural offers vivid images of Moscow, Paris, and New York in the 1920s as politically committed writers like Mayakovsky spread their political and physical seeds. In New York, “Negro musicians” entertain “the crowd with the latest wrinkle in jazz, something called the boogie-woogie,” and in Moscow, Boris Pasternak and Mayakovsky fire up revolutionaries at bohemian soirees. An inexorable momentum in the women’s recollections brings Mayakovsky to the end of the decade and a melancholy, tragic demise.
Littell’s mordent wit is perfectly suited to his melancholy tale, rich in dark imagery and razor-sharp dialogue.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 9781250100566
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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