This portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.
A kaleidoscopic narrative that follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives accidentally intersect during a single day in Munich, Germany, in 1948.
First published in 1951 and now available in an inspired new translation, this deeply sardonic, profoundly compassionate novel takes the reader onto the ruined postwar streets of Munich and inside the minds of the city’s inhabitants, their heads "still confused by hunger and explosions.” What seems at first to be a random parade of characters, each portrayed in alternating sections that seamlessly shift the novel’s third-person point of view—from that of a child to a psychologist to an old Nazi to an American soldier and so on—gradually coalesces to form a flawless, interconnected pattern of private dramas and chance meetings. Stories and lives overlap at an accelerating pace yet each protagonist is clearly defined, just as each is at the mercy of fate. Desperation fills the air. Doctors “queued to sell their blood…the only thing they had to sell.” But there is also, among some, a bewildered nostalgia presented with a garnish of irrepressible ironic wit. “Things were different, under Hitler!” one character hears her father lament. “Things had some gusto then.” The novel reaches its crescendo with the onstage appearance of a famous intellectual, the theme of whose lecture is “the deathless soul of the West.” When he arrives, the author notes, “photographers dropped on one knee like archers”—an image typical of the gems scattered liberally throughout the novel. And what follows is indeed a comical skewering of pomposity. At the critical moment, technology—the hope of the future—fails and great thoughts turn into electronic squawks, leaving an adoring crowd mystified.
This portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2918-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.
The making of a woman scientist over four decades of change in the middle of the 20th century.
“So what do you actually do?” Dr. Lottie Kristin Hart Levinson—aka Dr. Rat Westheimer—is asked at a cocktail party in 1984. “This may sound odd to you,” she replies, “but I study rat salivary glands. They’re more important than people think.” Her subsequent explanation details the role of cunnilingus in rat sex. Neither Lottie nor her creator is squeamish in any way—not about rat sex, or rat dissection, or human sex, all described with brio in these pages. As Lottie tells her football-star high school boyfriend, who becomes her first husband, “I want to know everything about my body, about your body, I want to try everything there is in the world, I want to try it all with you.” Actually, she saves some for her intrepid second husband 30-odd years later; there hasn’t been a menstruation sex scene like this since Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. Heyman’s debut novel after a successful story collection, Scary Old Sex (2016), also brings to mind Marge Piercy’s domestic dramas of the 1980s, which told the stories of women whose consciousness and lives were changed by the feminist movement and the new options it created in American life. From Lottie’s childhood in Michigan in the early 1940s through her struggles in the Vietnam War era to her maturity as a scientist, mother, and stepmother in the mid-1980s, her curiosity and intellect drive her as strongly as her hormones. It takes decades to tunnel her way through the walls sexism builds around her potential and find her way to the career in science she was made for. Caring as much about her work as she does about domestic life is a constant issue in Lottie’s adulthood; tragic consequences threaten and are not always averted.
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-471-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A more adorable plea for rationalism and gender equality would be hard to find.
Two chemists with major chemistry, a dog with a big vocabulary, and a popular cooking show are among the elements of this unusual compound.
At the dawn of the 1960s, Elizabeth Zott finds herself in an unexpected position. She's the star of a television program called Supper at Six that has taken American housewives by storm, but it's certainly not what the crass station head envisions: “ 'Meaningful?' Phil snapped. 'What are you? Amish? As for nutritious: no. You’re killing the show before it even gets started. Look, Walter, it’s easy. Tight dresses, suggestive movements...then there’s the cocktail she mixes at the end of every show.' ” Elizabeth is a chemist, recently forced to leave the lab where she was doing important research due to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Now she's reduced to explaining things like when to put the steak in the pan. "Be sure and wait until the butter foams. Foam indicates that the butter’s water content has boiled away. This is critical. Because now the steak can cook in lipids rather than absorb H2O.” If ever a woman was capable of running her own life, it's Elizabeth. But because it's the 1950s, then the '60s, men have their sweaty paws all over both her successes and failures. On the plus side, there's Calvin Evans, world-famous chemist, love of her life, and father of her child; also Walter Pine, her friend who works in television; and a journalist who at least tries to do the right thing. At the other pole is a writhing pile of sexists, liars, rapists, dopes, and arrogant assholes. This is the kind of book that has a long-buried secret at a corrupt orphanage with a mysterious benefactor as well as an extremely intelligent dog named Six-Thirty, recently retired from the military. ("Not only could he never seem to sniff out the bomb in time, but he also had to endure the praise heaped upon the smug German shepherds who always did.") Garmus' energetic debut also features an invigorating subplot about rowing.
A more adorable plea for rationalism and gender equality would be hard to find.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54734-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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