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THE WAY TO THE CATS

Israeli author Kenaz, published in English for the first time here, probes the perimeter and then the anguished center of helpless old age, to find within bitterness and fear, heroism and a kind of nobility. Unlovely, griping Mrs. Yolanda Moscowitz, a former French teacher, is recovering from a broken leg in a nursing institution. ``A big heavy woman, her face very raddled...with narrow slits of eyes pristine blue, clear and bright, like scraps of a lost distant sky.'' She takes great pains with her hair however, as if it ``had some magic power to protect her.'' Yolanda has no family; husband and kin have drained her life of freedom and promise. Yolanda is suspicious and puzzled by the friendly overtures of the painter Lazar, a fellow patient. ``Here is Inferno,'' declares Lazar, ``So what remains? A little solidarity, a little love, maybe?'' Lazar draws Yolanda's portraits; she is horrified by what he sees as ``ruins surviving a disaster.'' Throughout, dramas take place in the ward: a pale wraith of a pale life dies of a wasting disease; families warehouse their old and sick; nurses shield themselves, with anger or cold efficiency, from cries and demands that they cannot satisfy. Yolanda, given to heavy makeup and grotesque solo parades, fearing at one point that she has been invaded by ``someone else,'' begins to awaken, to see clearly ``the tragic inhuman beauty of the place.'' But at home in her small apartment again, she knows ``the world around her is emptying out.'' Then a mentally ill neighbor, who loves to see the cats in the courtyard, plunges to her death from her balcony. Yolanda and Lazar will have a final phoned dialogue of love, grief, and a poignant new self- knowledge, and Yolanda, above the courtyard, contemplates the glittering but unredeeming stars. This affecting entry from a new publisher (with send-off blurbs by Philip Roth and Amoz Oz.) plumbs with fevered intensity the ``bewilderment and frustration'' of old age's airless confinement.

Pub Date: March 23, 1994

ISBN: 1-883642-20-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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