An unflinching, nightmarish fable with plenty of smarts behind it.
A German family struggles for survival in the Venezuelan jungle after World War II, in a story thick with bloodshed and allegory.
Erich, the narrator of the second novel by Krol (Callisto, 2009), is a 16-year-old boy forced to grow up fast. His father died on the Russian front, and with no prospects in a decimated Nazi Germany, his mother opts to uproot Erich and his younger brother Zeppi and move to Venezuela. There she marries her brother-in-law Klaus. It’s purely a marriage of convenience (Klaus is a former SS officer eager to obscure his work in the concentration camps), and as if to punish the family for its inauthenticity, their plane crashes into a river deep in the jungle. They’re soon discovered by the Yayomi, a tribe that welcomes them thanks only to Gerhard Wentzler, a German researcher who’s been living with the natives while the Nazis laid waste to Europe. Wentzler soothes the Yayomi by saying the new arrivals are nonthreatening “dolphin people,” but, this being a story of culture clashes, the strategy doesn’t last long. Krol’s twist on lost-in-nature stories like Life of Pi and The Mosquito Coast is to emphasize Erich’s pubescent obsession with sex, manliness and authority, along with his immaturity (he clings to his dad’s Iron Cross, not to mention his anti-Semitism). That makes for a sometimes unseemly amount of detail about bodily functions, as Krol details the tribe’s bathroom behavior and Erich’s intimate relationship with a young native woman; moreover, Zeppi turns out to be a hermaphrodite, and terrifyingly bloodthirsty creatures lurk in the river. But Krol is admirably determined to explore the pure primal essence of each of his characters, and however off-putting some plot points might be, his writing is sharp, capturing the emotional zigzagging of his adolescent narrator without losing his grip on the plot. With the theme of anti-Semitism slowly becoming more amplified as the story moves along, Krol expertly turns his adventure story into a pointed commentary on the nature of tribal hatred.
An unflinching, nightmarish fable with plenty of smarts behind it.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-167296-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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