The second of German author's Timm's five novels to be translated into English (The Snake Tree, 1990) gleefully targets everything we love to hate about the 1980's—heartless greed, financial speculation, yuppie food faddists, overpriced doctors, artists with inflated reputations and bank accounts to match. Timm writes with a gusto and an abundance of earthy anecdote reminiscent of Saul Bellow in his vital youth. Like Bellow, he's in love with his hometown, the patrician-proletarian port city of Hamburg, and stuffs his book with street names, legends, weather, landscapes, and history. Peter Walter, a dreamer adrift in the overheated world of high-tech high finance, is on the lam from the law and his own conscience (embodied by a prissy meddling uncle) after having been found guilty of defrauding 69 customers in complex commodity speculations. We follow him from an upscale hideout in southern Spain to Brazil and on to Easter Island, an obsession ever since childhood, when said uncle told Walter that his missing father—a Swedish sailor—was there. While running, our picaresque hero/narrator tells his tale of upward mobile woe—from birth and poverty in Hamburg's red-light district to the moment of escape from jail. Flashbacks within flashbacks and some rather heavily drawn parallels between the cannibals of Easter Island and the dog-eat-dog world of high finance clog forward motion. But there's so much fun along the way it hardly matters. Walter's escapades as a window dresser fired for posing mannequins in obscene positions; as a fast-talking and empathetic insurance salesman; his business partner's escape from East Germany across the Baltic on a homemade surfboard, and a whole string of gritty populist reminiscences about the war years make lively reading. Witty asides, mini-lectures on the nature of capitalism, the failure of socialism, the fetishistic appeal of coin and paper money, and ``chaos ideology'' round out this comic, disabused fantasia on themes from das Kapital. Marx would have cracked a grudging smile.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8112-1254-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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