Although a major part of The Absolutist centers on the horrors of World War I, Irish author John Boyne has created a novel which goes beyond the typical “war story” and becomes also a study of character and values. This broader scope allows the novel to appeal to a wide audience interested in seeing the effects of war on the main character, Tristan Sadler, throughout the rest of his life. More a popular novel than a “literary” novel in its appeal to the reader, Boyne has carefully constructed the plot with alternating time settings – before, during, and after the war – to take full advantage of the elements of surprise. The author often hints at personal catastrophes or dramatic events in one part of the novel, creating a sense of suspense and foreboding, then reveals these secret events in grand fashion in another part, keeping the pace so lively that it is difficult for the reader to find a place to stop. Though the novel is very serious, with no humor to leaven it, The Absolutist is riveting, and a fast read, showing the personal side effects of war’s horrors.
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Martin Scobie, David Hughes, and Fred Privett, all age eighty-five, have just been admitted to the nursing home of St. Christopher and St. Jude following the bizarre crash of their three ambulances at the intersection in front of the facility. Admitted for their recuperation, they must share a small single room in which the light switch can only be reached by leaning across one bed. Some furniture has been removed to accommodate the extra beds, and the wardrobe, blocking a window, is inaccessible because of the third bed. Even if they had a view through that window, however, their accommodations would not be much improved. “Immediately outside the window was a mass of dusty green foliage of the kind which grows outside kitchens and hotel toilets…The leaves, moving in endless trembling toward and away from one another, gave an impression of trying to speak or to listen but always turning away before any tiny message could either be given or heard,” a detail emblematic of all life at this nursing home, which specializes in non-communication, not just between staff and patients, but between staff and each other, and among the patients themselves. As Australian author Elizabeth Jolley develops this relentlessly dark-humored and totally absorbing novel, she also displays enormous talent for developing sensitive character sketches of the elderly patients. Jolley is a world class author, capable of creating serious questions and developing the biggest of the world’s themes within small settings and scenes, and I can hardly wait to read the next book being released, MISS PEABODY’S INHERITANCE. She is a new Favorite!
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Those who have loved author Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1970 ) will undoubtedly be fascinated also by Angel (1957). Angel, less subtle in its black humor and obvious satire, will strike chords among all writers and lovers of writing who have ever, in their wildest imaginations, fantasized about producing a blockbuster novel, or even a moderately successful one. In 1900, Angel Deverell, fifteen, lives with her mother above the family grocery store in Norley. Emotionally, however, she lives on a completely different plane, imagining a life in which she is elegant, successful, admired by all, and, of course, wealthy beyond her most fervent dreams. Humiliated at school for something she has said, she announces that she will never return again to school. Instead she will finish writing a romantic novel, The Lady Urania, set at “Haven Castle,” a project on which she works almost around the clock, and she is sure it will be a success. Despite her age, it is HUGE, and Angel’s life and the lives of her family are never the same–and obviously, not always in a good way.
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Lysander Rief, the actor-son of famed Shakespearean actor Halifax Rief, is in Vienna, as the novel opens in August, 1913, seeking treatment for an embarrassing sexual problem. A close friend has suggested psychoanalysis, and Lysander has gone there for treatment. His doctor, a believer in “the fabulating function” of Bergson, not the methods of Freud, has told him that “If the everyday world, everyday reality is a fiction we create, then the same can be said of our past – the past is an aggregate of fictive realties we have already experienced – our memories.” His goal is nothing less than to make Lysander change the damaging “old fictions” into a unique blend – “a union, a fusing – of this individual imagination and reality.” What is real versus what merely seems real is obviously the primary theme here as Lysander deals with his problem, even as Europe deals with its problems and past histories in the lead-up to World War I. Additional themes of love and sex, and life and death as they overlap with the ideas of reality and fantasy enhance the main theme and bring it to life in new ways. However well drawn the themes may be (and the fiction vs. reality theme is extremely well done), the novel is memorable primarily for its good story, a trademark of author William Boyd throughout his long career. Providing plenty of well-developed background for his main characters, Boyd also leaves mysteries in their lives, developing these mysteries to add complexity to his plot as the novel progresses.
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Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of four time periods, author Andrei Makine analyzes what it means to be human; whether an individual is important in his own right or as part of a community; what makes life worth living; what obligations, if any, an individual has toward other individuals; and how and why individuals expresses themselves in art, literature, or music. Main character Shutov’s favorite authors, Chekhov and Tolstoy, whom he often quotes, are from the early twentieth century, yet they have helped provide Shutov with the values he retains even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Georgy Lvovich, known as Volsky, a character with whom Shutov has a life-changing conversation in Parts III and IV has survived the Siege of Leningrad in the 1940s, then has had to deal with the aftermath of the war and the communist crackdowns and mass arrests in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. Shutov himself grew up in the mid-‘fifties but knows little about a life like Volsky’s, having left for France in early 1980 and lived a fairly anonymous life. His affair with young Lea, followed by a visit to St. Petersburg to a former flame, show him how much times have changed, and Shutov has failed to adapt to the times, not even acknowledging that adaptation might have some value. The novel, powerfully and passionately drawn, presents well developed themes about life, death, individuality, and the arts, and their significant changes during a century of historical and philosophical upheaval. Romantic and often heartbreaking.
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