A mature and absorbing story of sacrifice, illusion, and resignation, and an important contribution to the literature of...
Zelitch’s superb second outing (after The Confession of Jack Straw, 1991) retells the Old Testament story of Ruth through the saga of two women bound together by their shared experience of Hungary under the Nazis and of Israel after WWII.
Nora Csongradi, who tells the tangled story, remains in Budapest throughout the 1930s, despite the urging of her beloved cousin Bela that she join him in Palestine, whence he had emigrated to a kibbutz. Both Nora’s husband, engineering student and mathematics teacher Janos Gratz, and their headstrong son Gabor (a gifted, temperamental musician) are frustrated and, to differing degrees, struggle to survive in their country’s volatile political climate. When her losses become unendurable, the embittered Nora—finally—emigrates to Palestine, in search of Bela. She’s accompanied by the eponymous Louisa, the German music student whom son Gabor had married and whose inexplicably firm devotion to the unloving Nora underscores the degree to which both women ultimately become displaced persons (“Here . . . [Louisa] was the daughter of a cursed nation, far from home, clinging to her mother-in-law and taking on her people and her God”). In a seamless interweaving of observation, memory, and imagination, Nora recalls in rich detail her own childhood, marriage, and retreat from the burdens that Janos insistently shoulders; reconstructs the history of Gabor’s troubled union with Louisa and his self-destructive impulses (perhaps related to his mother’s emotional coolness); and wryly traces the process of assimilation by which Louisa’s dream of redemption, and her own of reunion, are ironically realized. Though the aforementioned Book of Ruth is the novel’s specific inspiration, Zelitch deepens its pathos still further by linking the image of enlightenment and peace that Bela has promised and Nora has sought in “the Holy Land” with the cautionary biblical tale of the prophet and wanderer Jonah.
A mature and absorbing story of sacrifice, illusion, and resignation, and an important contribution to the literature of Holocaust and Exodus.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14659-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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