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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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