Everything, every trifle will be valuable and meaningful" as someone's "future recollection"—this line is a validation for many of these thirteen stories written between 1924 and 1935 for various Russian emigre publications. It comes from one of the most fragmentary ones, "A Guide to Berlin," which Nabokov, in one of his prefatory annotations, describes as the "trickiest", although it could not be more simple. In fact all of these are devoid of the devices and diddles to come. Two return to his childhood through the miserable boy Peter, stigmatized as a "poseur" on "A Bad Day" when he visits his cousins; still miserable in "Orache" (in translation the word means ache), the scanted child of an ill and absent mother, an absent and negligent father. In between the several incidental to forgettable trifles, 'the stories pair off almost too easily. There are two awkward confrontations in Berlin that connect with far more feeling: one between two brothers, long out of touch, perhaps even strangers; the other between a son who's been everywhere during the last seven years before he goes to find his once elegant mother, now not only a displaced person but an aged, anxious, restless, tawdry woman. Both "Christmas" and "A Busy Man" again return to Russia to reveal the magus at his dazzling best—the writing is singularly beautiful, framing the melancholy, death-directed, solitary reconnaissances of two men trapped between the present and the past and between the present and the anonymity ahead. Up to then, however, the collection offers only occasional reading for the complete Nabokovian—small butterflies which just take wing as retrospect or in anticipation.
Pub Date: March 1, 1976
ISBN: 0070457212
Page Count: 180
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1976
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
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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