The wittiest political novel we've seen in some time, and a fine beginning to what one hopes is this accomplished...
The final days in power of Panama's military strongman Manuel Noriega are the subject of this savvy and bleakly comic first fiction by New Yorker reporter Wright (Twins: Their Remarkable Double Lives—and What They Tell Us About Who We Are, 1998, etc.).
Wright's "Tony" Noriega is an appalling, fascinating, and at times even sympathetic figure. He enters the novel following an account of the discovery of populist "revolutionary" Hugo Spandafora's headless corpse, and a brief dose of the irreverent cynicism indulged by Archbishop Morette, "banished" to Panama City by the Vatican. Noriega, at this time, is in Geneva, receiving extreme-measure medical treatment for "acne vulgaris." Thereafter, the story careens gracefully between illustrations of Noriega's iron-fisted rule (specifically, as experienced first-hand by the Archbishop's idealistic and unworldly subordinate, Father Jorge Ugarte) and often hilarious debunkings of the Great Man's relationships with puppet politicos who clamor for at least the appearance of authority, military aides who inconveniently develop consciences, Noriega's wrathful wife Felicidad and petulant mistress Carmen, murderous Colombian drug-lord Pablo Escobar and neighboring fellow dictator Fidel Castro; even visiting "diplomat" Colonel Oliver North (who blithely preaches George Bush's gospel of international pragmatism). There are horrors aplenty, and handsome, earnest Father Jorge offers the perfect contrast to the introverted, paranoid, deeply insecure General Noriega, whose most trusted associates are the specimens that reside in his private aviary (notably, Pepe, "a neurotic sulfur-crested cockatoo") and his personal "psychic," witch-doctor, and sex consultant, Santeria priest Gilbert Blancarte. Wright takes no prisoners (even a well-meaning former "Presidente" imagines himself "a soldier of economic enlightenment, imposing the stern teachings of Milton Friedman on the Third World, much as the Conquistadors had imposed bloody Christianity on the savages of the past"), in a vigorous full-dress satiric farce that neatly skewers the self-righteous mendacity of all the Americas, ours very much included.
The wittiest political novel we've seen in some time, and a fine beginning to what one hopes is this accomplished journalist's second career.Pub Date: March 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86810-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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