Although overly schematic, Otto makes these eight women and the differing lenses through which they view the 20th century...
Otto (A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity, 2002, etc.) combines a paean to the art form with an argument for women’s rights in these interlocking stories of eight fictional woman photographers, clearly inspired by actual photographers, over the course of the 20th century.
While studying photochemistry in 1909 Dresden, Cymbeline discovers a soul mate in her middle-aged professor. The handful of photographs that record their brief, doomed affair are lost when a maid sets fire to Cymbeline’s San Francisco studio in 1917. Married to someone else by then and expected to put her domestic responsibilities first, Cymbeline abandons her work in portraiture but finds an outlet in photographing her garden. Slightly younger British photographer Amadora’s commitment to the art form is initially more a matter of happenstance and suffragette dabbling than passion. But when her husband returns damaged from World War I, Amadora uses color photography to create a world for him. Italian-born Clara, who lives in San Francisco’s artistic circles before moving to Mexico in the 1920s, is undone by her intertwining passions for art, men and politics. In contrast, wealthy N.Y. socialite Ellen, raised to separate love from sex, avoids intimacy in life or photography until she becomes a photojournalist in World War II. After escaping 1930s Germany, Jewish photographer and lesbian/bohemian Charlotte marries for security and moves to Argentina, but her true love remains another woman. The contradictory pull between romantic love and family becomes more complicated when her career takes off. Miri feels trapped in post-WWII domesticity until she starts photographing Manhattan from her apartment window, and the tension of domestic love energizes her creativity. Cymbeline has already emerged as the novel’s uniting presence by the time she visits Miri’s exhibit. 1970s radical feminist Jessie interviews Cymbeline, picking up some hard-won advice. Coming full circle in 1980 is domestic free-spirit Jenny, whose photography of her children is labeled pornographic.
Although overly schematic, Otto makes these eight women and the differing lenses through which they view the 20th century hard to forget.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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