A tale that deals with a worthy subject, but without the gravity and depth to tackle it in any satisfying way.
Will romantic love keep a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in a country where soldiers will beat him—or worse—for the slightest provocation? That’s the $64,000 question in this somewhat shallow treatment of Chilean life under Pinochet’s savage regime.
Harry Bayliss arrives in 1978 Chile armed for his ordeal with only fluent Spanish and a good batting average. The onetime minor-league player plans to while away a year in tropical climes, teaching baseball to underprivileged children. His naïve vision is shattered, however, during his first confrontation with soldiers. They spit on him and, when he objects, threaten to take him in for `interrogation.` Harry’s eyes open even further when he ventures into poverty-stricken neighborhoods and meets the grief-overwhelmed families of the Disappeared—revolutionaries who are arrested, never to be heard from again. `You have to be tough to live here,` Harry announces. Such trite proclamations plague Hazuka’s second novel (The Road to the Island, 1998). The author seems more intent on dictating the reader’s reaction to his scenes than on adding character depth. He further misses his opportunity for profundity when Harry falls in love with Marisol Huerta, a former wife of one of the Disappeared. True, this twist exposes Harry more deeply to the country’s inequities—he visits a mental asylum for subversives, and a friend is assassinated. But Hazuka’s refusal to sketch Marisol’s background—it’s too painful for her to talk about—robs the story of its more personal and affecting elements. Some sentiment is stirred, at least, when Harry’s firing from the Peace Corps forces him to decide whether love for Marisol makes it worth staying in a brutal country .
A tale that deals with a worthy subject, but without the gravity and depth to tackle it in any satisfying way.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-882593-31-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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