An empathetic, challenging examination of familial secrets, shame, and solidarity.
In Rosenberg’s (This Is Not Civilization, 2004) second novel, a man attempts to “resolve the puzzle” of his relationship with his late, estranged brother.
To the rest of the world, Yusuf Elmas was the hard-partying, womanizing CEO of the cellphone company Teletürk. But to Avram Benezra, Yusuf was his younger brother who rejected the family name and made billions while Avram led an unflashy life as an architect, husband, and father. In the spring of 2005, 14 years after they last spoke, Avram receives a call from Yusuf in the middle of the night and promptly hangs up on him. The following day, he finds out that his brother, a strong swimmer, drowned in the Sea of Marmara after a high-speed boating accident. Five years later, Avram learns that Yusuf had bequeathed his decrepit mansion on the Princes’ Islands to their dead father. Although Avram’s marriage is troubled, he travels alone to the islands to renovate the mansion with the help of Yusuf’s servants, including cook Flora Demirkan, whose 19-year-old daughter, Yasemin Demopoulous, drowned alongside his brother. As Avram speaks with Yusuf’s friends and acquaintances, he reconciles his memory of his difficult sibling—who accused their father of thievery, among other crimes—with an image of a kindhearted, ethical man who risked his life to publicly acknowledge the Armenian genocide in his native Turkey. Avram begins to suspect that his brother’s political actions are connected to his suspicious death, and author Rosenberg hints at a suspenseful conspiracy narrative to which he never quite commits. Despite this missed opportunity, the novel remains compelling and moving thanks to the sibling relationship at its core, which raises provocative questions about loyalty, jealousy, and how well one person can know another. A longing for intimacy shines through Rosenberg’s loveliest passages, as when 9-year-old Avram treats his 5-year-old brother’s cystic fibrosis and comes to “know, better than my own, the geometry of moles and birthmarks on [Yusuf’s] neck.”
An empathetic, challenging examination of familial secrets, shame, and solidarity.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942515-18-0
Page Count: 494
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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