Review by New York Times Review
THE UNSETTLERS: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America, by Mark Sundeen. (Riverhead, $16.) Sundeen profiles three families - whom he calls pioneers, of a sort - who chose to live off the grid. They share an important commonality: "They had each taken on a fundamental aspect of how the world is broken, and had attempted, with all their might, to address it - in ways that felt sustainable, maybe even replicable." ENIGMA VARIATIONS, by Andre Aciman. (Picador, $16.) Aciman chronicles a lifetime of desire, love and loss. The central character, Paul, has an early infatuation with a craftsman in Italy that provides the story line's loose framework; the plot skips ahead to find him years later, nearly unrecognizable in an acrimonious relationship. Aciman's novel is a masterly portrayal of arousal and the selves forged by passion. LETTERS TO VERA, by Vladimir Nabokov. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. (Vintage, $20.) For over 50 years, Vera was a "song," a muse, a protector for her husband. (She was the one to save an early draft of "Lolita" after Vladimir tried to destroy it.) "It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation," our reviewer, Martin Amis, wrote, "and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy." LONG BLACK VEIL, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. (Broadway, $16.) It's August 1980, and a band of college friends are looking for mischief in an abandoned Philadelphia prison. But when one of them goes missing, the night ends in tragedy. Years later, the student's body is found, and one of the survivors risks exposing two long-held secrets to protect the truth. As our reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, put it: "To the author, the prison is more than a setting, it's also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she once led." PRINCE CHARLES: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, by Sally Bedell Smith. (Random House, $20.) A sympathetic portrait of Charles comes down squarely in his favor, particularly with regard to Diana. He emerges as a thoughtful, intellectually driven man in Bedell's telling. The author, who has written at length about the royal family, offers a cleareyed view of the monarchy, its privilege and its faltering morals. ON TURPENTINE LANE, by Elinor Lipman. (Mariner, $14.99.) Faith Frankel is 32, perhaps more than a little bored, and has set down roots in her Massachusetts hometown. But mysterious objects in her new bungalow draw her into the neighborhood's past. Lipman's screwball romance is full of delightfully weird characters, from Faith's neo-hippie fiance to her father, an amateur artist churning out Chagall copies.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Always searching for more, for something that isn't there, and wondering if finding true love happens only once these are the twin themes upon which Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013) artfully constructs his latest deeply felt novel. Paul, in his early twenties, returns to his family's summer home on an island off the coast of Italy, which had been the setting for his first but unspoken and unacted-upon love in his adolescence. Giovanni is the local cabinetmaker whose gentle shadow is cast over Paul's life forever. Consequently, Paul conducts his relationships with both male and female lovers from an emotional distance: no one can replace Giovanni. Years later, when Paul returns to the island, which his family no longer visits after their summer house burned to the ground, to come face to face with Giovanni once more, he finds that many things have changed over the years. Aciman's sensuous, subtle language supports not only his marvelous descriptive power but also how deeply and resonantly he constructs his fondly and fully conceived characters.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A breathless, sketched rendering of one man's life in love, Aciman's novel speaks earnestly not only of longing and lust, but also of more complicated emotions-"the lightning and then silence" of unrequited attraction, and the mutable desire "neither to be on this side of the river nor on the other but on the space and transit in between." Paul's first crush, during his adolescence in Italy, is a handsome, talented local craftsman employed by his family; considering his passion for Giovanni "my first encounter with time," Paul returns to the island of San Giustiniano as a young man out of college, only to discover that the real object of Giovanni's interest was much closer than he supposed. Adult life in New York brings Paul no new clarity: suspecting his girlfriend, Maud, of cheating on him with a handsome visitor, he becomes drawn to the visitor himself. Finally entering into a relationship with fellow tennis player Manfred, he engages in periodic encounters with Chloe, a college friend with whom he shares a fraught but enduring connection: "we loved with every organ but the heart." Resorting occasionally to belabored and repetitive language, Aciman (Call Me by Your Name) nevertheless portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy. Coming to terms with his sexuality, by midlife Paul has "grown to love serving two masters-perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
During a dinner party-with two of his lovers sitting at the table-Paul, the protagonist of this urbane novel, muses on the possibility of multiple lives occurring simultaneously: one lived in ordinary time; another that bursts and fizzles; another that is achievable but that somehow we end up not living. Handsome, bisexual, and a member of New York's creative class, Paul is haunted by too many choices. The story inhabits his interior world of sexual desires; New York City, though richly rendered, is a pale backdrop to his finely parsed ruminations and recriminations. His work is barely mentioned, though we know it allows him to arrive late after tennis and leave early for lunch and dinner dates. But this isn't a prurient tale; years pass while Paul hesitantly pursues a male tennis partner, a former college girlfriend, a young female writer. His sexual experiences and attitudes are colored by his unattainable first love, a cabinetmaker he met as a teenager in Italy, where his parents had a summer home. VERDICT Aciman's (Tell Me Your Name) sophisticated and erudite novel is constructed of chapters that feel like interlocking stories. Despite the plot's sexual feints and infidelities, the tone is curiously humorless. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James -Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Love among the ruinsand with Ethan Frome, tennis, martinis, and Starbucks on the set as well.As often in his fiction, Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013, etc.) immerses readers in a milieu that is achingly sensuousand sensual, toowith not much regard for pedestrian ideas of what constitutes whatever normal behavior is supposed to be. Even so, his characters are often beset by moral agony over the choices they make in following their hearts. In the case of Paul, a definitively sensitive man of fleetingly passing years, just about everything is a Proustian madeleine: Greek and Latin, the glint of Mediterranean sunlight, the cooling scent of coffee from the roasting mill that seemed to welcome me no differently now than when I ran errands with my mother. Then there is music, so elegantly alluded to in the title, and the memories of men and women who have fallen in his path and bed and sometimes imparted wisdom along the way; as an early object of desire says, knowingly, It could be life or it could be a strip of wood that refuses to bend as it should. Paul bends easily in his pursuits, broadly catholic in his affinities. Acimans portrait of him and his world is thoughtful, sympathetic, and never prurient; Paul is very much, as a friend of his remarks, like Sicily in having many identities and all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough. He is not at all reprehensible, yet he is not blameless, either; Pauls quest for self-awareness, to say nothing of his quest for pleasure, carries plenty of collateral damage. Most of it he bears himself, though; as he says, with knowing resignation, I think everyone is wounded in their sexI cant think of one person who isnt. An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then somebut also with the knowledge that such regret is easy enough to live down. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
