What a splendid idea for a novel: the private diary kept (in French, for secrecy) by the wife of English literature’s most celebrated diarist—and British novelist George, best known for such suspense thrillers as Acid Drop (1975), carries it off with considerable success. French-born Elizabeth, the daughter of a Huguenot scientist, married up-and-coming civil servant Samuel Pepys when she was 15. In George’s skillful reimagining of the historical record, she begins her journal after approximately a year of marriage. It’s a lively, sometimes truculent accounting of household duties and annoyances, the couple’s several acquaintances with nobility and royalty (as “Sam” rises in the public world, taking such government positions as Secretary to the British Admiralty, and is accepted into London’s Royal Society), and miscellaneous other honors and excitements. Elizabeth is a beauty who unwittingly male attention (such as that of the Earl of Sandwich, Sam’s epicurean patron); a woman of spirit not at all slavishly devoted to her husband (“He isn’t all my life”), who enjoys as well the satisfactions of reading romantic poetry, and can turn a polished aphoristic phrase worthy of Jane Austen (“the nature of fondness [consists] not so much in tenderness as in dread of what loss of the other would mean”). Her diary entries, recorded at irregular intervals, vividly detail such momentous events as the “plague summer” of 1665 and the Great Fire of London. But the epochal events of Elizabeth’s life are her failure to conceive (one entry is a plaintive “list of things to do for childlessness”) and the accidental discovery of Sam’s dalliance with a young housemaid” a crisis that gives Elizabeth an upper hand she never thereafter relinquishes until her death (at age 29) of typhoid fever. An ingenious fictional invention—and, as it happens, an appealing companion volume to Samuel Pepys’ own wonderfully entertaining Diary.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20554-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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