This first English translation of a novel left uncompleted at the author’s death is also the first edition to include all its partially inchoate, though consistently fascinating content. Martin du Gard (1881—1958) remains the least internationally appreciated of France’s major modern novelists, despite the 1937 Nobel prize awarded chiefly in recognition of his great eight-volume saga, The World of the Thibaults (1922—40). Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, which he worked on periodically for the last 18 years of his life, was an autumnal magnum opus: a large-scale portrayal of his country’s transformations during and after WWI, as observed by its meditative protagonist and narrator, Maumort, a soldier, gentleman, and scholar. Maumort intuits from the new century’s destructive momentum a human flaw he diagnoses as the futility of the individual conscience, which cannot prevent someone who wishes to do good from instead countenancing, and thus perpetuating, evil. The author’s leisurely narrative encompasses exhaustive analyses of Maumort’s privileged childhood relationships with his cousin Guy (a wonderful study in adolescent egoism) and their troubled tutor; a disillusioning love affair with an exotic older woman followed by a bitterly unhappy marriage; combat experiences in North Africa and Europe; and the old warrior’s last days in retirement, as German armies once again march on his homeland. Maumort’s memoirs are buttressed (and interestingly qualified) by his letters to a beloved friend and by a concluding gathering of random reflections and aphorisms on various subjects that evoke Pascal’s PensÇes and perhaps even Montaigne’s essays as precedents. This is a novel that demands intense, perhaps repeated reading. Yet its doggedly heroic presentation of a tortured mind and soul hell-bent on understanding itself adds up, eventually, to a reading experience like no other. Martin du Gard’s great admirer Albert Camus called the older novelist “our perpetual contemporary.” This unfinished symphony of self-exploration is both close kin to its acknowledged models, Tolstoy and Proust, and a work of startling originality and innovation.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-43397-X
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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