by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004
A shuffling, to some degree, of all the same cards makes for a certain repetitiveness. But Jhabvala still outwrites many an...
Jhabvala (Shards of Memory, 1995, etc.) describes a life she could have lived but didn’t.
Backgrounded by the question What if?, each of the nine chapters here is a variant on Jhabvala’s actual life. The women who narrate were born in Germany to Jewish families, as Jhabvala was; before WWII, they immigrated to Britain, as she did, or to the US, and, like her, they share a preoccupation with India. Some chapters are more memorable than others. In the first and most accomplished, the narrator, now old and living on a reduced income, returns to India, where she can live more cheaply. She’d lived there as a young woman working on her dissertation, but her demanding family summoned her back to New York to care for them. In India again, she is comforted by the presence of many old women like herself, who have spent “ lives of unrequited longing.” In one chapter with a New York setting, the narrator has an affair with a refugee pianist whom her mother idolizes; in another, when an old Indian lover, though ailing and wanted by the police, comes to stay, the narrator ruefully observes that he’s still attractive to younger women. Money is a problem as properties must be sold and rooms let to fellow émigrés. A narrator often falls in love with a charismatic man with spiritual interests, whom she follows to, or meets up with in, India. Relationships never work out, and the narrators are observers of others’ happiness as their own eludes them. India, too, though revered, is often equally disappointing. None of these alternate lives is enviable, though each is interesting, peopled with such characters as a famous émigré artist down on his luck who sketches a narrator in her youth; and a notable Indian guru in whose mountain home another finds temporary fulfillment.
A shuffling, to some degree, of all the same cards makes for a certain repetitiveness. But Jhabvala still outwrites many an author.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-028-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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