Charming character study of an attractive turn-of-the-century con man. Noah's first novel, All the Right Answers (1988), deftly traced the quiz-show scandal of the late 1950s and featured a similarly charming scoundrel/rigger of game shows. The story this time begins on August 21, 1911, when Leonardo's La Gioconda is stolen from the Louvre. Who masterminded the theft? According to an article printed in 1932 in the Saturday Evening Post, a certain Marquis de Valfierno was responsible, and upon this pedestal Noah shapes his tale. At 56, the Marquis has a long history of selling forgeries of lost paintings by old masters, even though these ``lost'' paintings never in fact existed. They are instead the original products of one Yves Chaudron, an extraordinary young copyist whose brilliant future is subverted by the Marquis into making the supposedly lost ``originals'' by Murillo and others—which the Marquis has sold in Buenos Aires and now hawks as priceless works in Mexico City. When the Marquis falls in love with Rosa Maria, his barber's 16-year-old daughter, then impregnates and marries her, he foresees that she and his child will long outlive him. Not even his skills as a con man can raise enough money to carry her through the rest of her life without him. And so he dreams up his grand farewell theft of the Mona Lisa, moving his crew, his barber, and Rosa Maria to Paris and preparing to rape the Louvre of its smiling Leonardo. When the theft takes place, the Marquis is in New York, having set up six different buyers before the picture was even stolen. With the original hidden in Paris, he instructs Chaudron to paint six copies and sells four of them to Americans. And how does the original return to the Louvre? Witty dialogue and a thoroughly colorful cast of rogues.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-16916-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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