by Thomas Bernhard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 1995
The final novel, published in Germany in 1986, from the Austrian virtuoso (193189) whose bleakly pessimistic fiction (The Loser, 1991, etc.) echoes the classic misanthropy of his obvious literary ancestors, Jonathan Swift and Louis-Ferdinand CÇline. Bernhard's story comprises a breakneck monologue spewed forth by Franz-Josef Murau, an egalitarian sybarite whose estrangement from his wealthy provincial Austrian family takes him to live and teach in Rome. Murau's eggshell sensibility is roughly jolted when he's informed that his parents and older brother have been killed in an automobile accident and that he must return to the family estate, Wolfsegg, to join his sisters in settling their inheritance. The memories subsequently evoked cohere in a diatribe ``spoken'' in effect to the young Italian he tutors, with Murau exhaustively condemning his family's complacency, subliteracy, and vanity; his mother's ``errors of taste [and] megalomaniac idiocies'' (not to mention her adultery with a preening Roman Catholic archbishopor has he imagined this?); the ugly sweaters his sisters knit.... Nothing escapes the cold basilisk eye this accomplished cynic casts on his family and culture: The objects of his wrath include photography, socialism, Catholicism, doctors, pigeons, marriage, and German literatureeven Goethe (``Germany's foremost intellectual quack''). Few humans known to him elicit Murau's admirationthose few include dreamy cousin Alexander and cosmopolitan (deceased) Uncle Georg, a civilizing mentor who shared, as he shaped, his nephew's distaste for bourgeois values. What's amazing about this potentially monotonous outpouring of bile is the amount of fully described and analyzed life outside Murau himself to which his austere insularity gives detailed expression. McLintock's translation is superb: You can really hear Franz- Josef's whiny, petulant, hate-filled, self-hating voice. Not an easy read, but, still, a triumphant example of Bernhard's claustrophobic and challenging art. Its picture of a lonely, stunned, self-torturing soul is unforgettable.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-57253-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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by Thomas Bernhard & translated by Michael Hofmann
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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