Rosenbaum has high ambitions, but here he disorients with a kind of jokey hilarity that disrupts his philosophical asides,...
Rosenbaum’s latest (Second Hand Smoke, 1999, etc.) promises an engagement with the relations between art, suffering, and memory, but delivers Mel Brooks without the rim shots in the tale of a blocked Jewish mystery writer whose daughter resurrects ghosts to release his creativity.
The “golems” of the title aren’t traditional golems, but just ghosts—the “golem” was conceived in Jewish mythology as a protector of the Jews of a Prague synagogue. These are the spirits of Primo Levi, Paul Celan, and Jerzy Kosinski, among others, all major Jewish literary figures who committed suicide after lives of remembering the Holocaust. Invoking them gives Rosenbaum’s lightweight fiction a claim to a gravity that the story doesn’t sustain, an especially excruciating failure in the absence of any suggestion of engaged familiarity with the work of these artists. Oliver Levin is a successful mystery novelist whose daughter Ariel ends up with freeing him from his writer’s block. With a handful of mud from the banks of the Hudson, she inadvertently summons up the shades of Celan, Kosinski, and Levi, as well as Jean Amery, Piotr Rawicz, and Tadeusz Borowski, not to mention Levin’s parents, Lothar and Rose, who, like the writers, killed themselves after surviving the Holocaust. The eight ghosts proceed to transform New York City—gas is eliminated as a heating source, the Yankees lose their pinstripes, smoke of all forms is eliminated—and daughter Ariel finds herself startlingly endowed with a gift for klezmer music. Though the ghostly shenanigans are related amusingly, the upshot is Levin’s compulsion to commit suicide himself after getting in touch with his feelings. The ghosts, feeling bad, encourage him to stay alive, and the whole group, father, daughter and ghosts, fly down to Miami, where Lothar and Rose lived, to close the story oceanside.
Rosenbaum has high ambitions, but here he disorients with a kind of jokey hilarity that disrupts his philosophical asides, rendering The Golems of Gotham an unstable mix of camp and earnestness.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018490-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cussler's most adult, least comic-strip-y entry yet in the Dirk Pitt sea sagas. Gone is the outlandish plotting of Treasure (1988), when Dirk found Cleopatra's barge in Texas, and of Sahara (199), which unearthed Lincoln's body in a Confederate sub—buried in the desert sands. Now, in his 11th outing, Dirk Pitt and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) fight villainous megalomaniac Arthur Dorsett, head of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, which holds the world's wealthiest diamond-mine empire. Pitt and his team must fight as well Dorsett's three daughters, the coldly beauteous Amazonian Boudicca, whose giant strength dwarfs Dirk's; the elegant but heartless Deirdre; and the star-crossed zoologist Maeve, whose bastard twins are held captive by grandfather Arthur so that Maeve will infiltrate NUMA and report on its investigation of his holdings—even though Dirk recently saved Maeve and Deirdre's lives in the Antarctic. First, however, Cussler takes us back to 1856 and a typhoon-battered British clipper ship, the Gladiator, that sinks in uncharted seas off Australia; only eight survive, including Jess Dorsett "the highwayman," a dandyish-looking convict, who discovers raw diamonds when stranded on an uninhabited island. From this arises the Dorsett empire, bent on undermining the world market in diamonds by dumping a colossal backlog of stones and colored gems into its vast chain of jewelry stores and, with one blow, toppling De Beers and all rivals. Worse, Arthur Dorsett excavates by high-energy-pulsed ultrasound, and when ultrasound from all four of his island mines (one on Gladiator Island, near New Zealand, another by Easter Island, the last two in the North Pacific Ocean) happen to converge, a killer shock wave destroys all marine and human life for 30 kilometers around, and now threatens over a million people in Hawaii—unless Dirk Pitt's aging body can hold it back. Tireless mechanical nomenclature, but furious storytelling.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80297-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
Readers here get both: “Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once.”
A sprawling family saga with a zesty Mexican-American accent from Cisneros, author of, most recently, Woman Hollering Creek (1991).
Every summer, all three Reyes brothers drive with their wives and children from Chicago to Mexico City to visit their parents. Narrator Lala begins with a particularly dreadful trip during which “the Awful Grandmother” reveals a shameful secret from her favorite son’s past to humiliate her detested daughter-in-law. These are Lala’s parents, and Lala then rolls the narrative back, goaded by a scolding second voice whose identity we learn later, to tell us how a desolate, abandoned girl named Soledad became the Awful Grandmother. Soledad comes from a family of shawl-makers, and her most significant possession is a rebozo caramelo, a silk shawl whose striped design, when she unfurls it after her husband’s death, evokes “the past . . . the days to come. All swirling together like the stripes.” Wearing it years later to her parents’ 30th anniversary, Lala brings the fringe to her lips and tastes “cooked pumpkin familiar and comforting and good, reminding me I’m connected to so many people, so many.” Cisneros’ keen eye enlivens descriptions of everything from Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street flea market to Soledad’s sun-stroked house on Destiny Street. (The author riffs playfully throughout on the double meaning of destino, as either “destiny” or “destination”; it’s hard to imagine that the simultaneous Spanish-language edition will be as stylistically original as this casually bilingual text.) Melodrama abounds, and the narrator doesn’t disdain her tale’s links to Mexico’s famed telenovelas. In one of many entertaining footnotes, vehicles for historical and biographical background as well as the author’s opinions, she insists that those TV soap operas merely “[emulat] Mexican life.” The only way to cope is with a robust sense of humor. As Lala’s friend Viva says, “You’re the author of the telenovela of your life. Comedy or tragedy? Choose.”
Readers here get both: “Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once.”Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-43554-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
PERSPECTIVES
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