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THE SHUNRA AND THE SCHMETTERLING

Name: THE SHUNRA AND THE SCHMETTERLING
Author: Yoel Hoffmann
ISBN: 0-8112-1567-9

by Yoel Hoffmann & translated by Peter Cole ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2004

Beautiful, humane, priceless.

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A poetic little slip of a thing that holds the world, decades, entire lives, sorrows and beauties all as if in a pair of cupped hands.

The title is from Aramaic for “cat” and German for “butterfly,” a suggestion of the elusiveness of what Hoffmann (The Heart is Katmandu, 2001, etc.) tries to catch in his numbered chapters with their alphabetized paragraphs and subchapters—all very short, and all evoking in one way or another the experience of a boy growing up in Israel. His visions and memories of the world around him blend the boy’s (“the chain of my Raleigh bicycle slipped out of the gears, and I saw, through the thin metal rods called spokes, Rachel Sirotta among the myrtles”) and the grown man’s (“All sorts of women whose names were Hilda tossed in their sleep”), just as effortlessly as they move from loveliness (“Franz sends his hand out toward the west and almost by chance pulls down the sun”) to the horrible (“Ehud Kaplan . . . two years later wrapped himself up in cotton and burned”). The boy’s parents are here (“this woman Mathilda, the daughter of R. Avraham of Frankfurt, and . . . this slanting man Andreas, the son of Yitzhak . . .”), as are his grandfather (“Biblical air surrounded him in his bed with bronze bars . . . “), his schooling (“we fell from school to school and in each place the chairs became larger”), eccentricities (“The words ‘nimbus clouds’ disturb him. He does not agree with the word nimbus”), love (“When Monica took offer her dress, grasshoppers leapt in the grass”), and, always, the universal in the humble: “[He] turns the wheel of the Singer sewing machine and the wheel that he turns in turn turns another (which is connected to it by a leather strip) and these two wheels drive the great wheel within which move the stars.”

Beautiful, humane, priceless.

Pub Date: May 25, 2004

ISBN: 0-8112-1567-9

Page Count: 128

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MOODS
by Yoel Hoffmann ; translated by Peter Cole

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HEART IS KATMANDU
by Yoel Hoffmann & translated by Peter Cole

- BOOK REVIEW
BERNHARD
by Yoel Hoffmann

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.