Customer Reviews

The Scenic Route: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The doomed love affair and the road trip are beautifully done, but this novel cuts far deeper than the surface of plot and device. It is often hilariously funny. Brilliant and biting, the comedy is dark. Kirshenbaum's characters are the imperfect beings of great literature. This is an honest articulation of the particular fears of the middle-aged. It's a mediation on memory, and how all too easily we can forget who matters and what needs to be remembered. It's about sorrow and death and the tragedy of timidity. The way it is told is ingenious. The scenic route is the narrative. It digresses, detours and turns back on itself as if by magic. Characters seem to get dropped only to reappear at that exact moment when you are ready for them to return. Snippets of memory pop in and vanish. This is a novel that needs to be read more than once or twice. I'm a big fan of Kirshenbaum's writing. This is her most ambitious book to date. It succeeds richly on every level.

Don't read this book if you don't like brilliant fiction, hit the nail on the head dialogue, character portrayals so right-on you think Binnie Kirshenbaum has been in your living room, head, heart, and bedroom and those of your entire family.

Read 'The Scenic Route' if you do want what everyone who loves a good read wants: to be transported into the lives of people so instantly rich and full that you know them right away, in fact, they may be you.

Binnie Kirshenbaum triumphs in her writing and in her ability to see what is true and real and honest in human nature and shares that with her readers in this darkly comic and profoundly moving novel.

This book, this beautiful book, is so smart, so real in its truth, that it can both break your heart and make you smile for days.

Buy it, read it, love it!!!

Forty-two year old divorced Manhattanite Sylvia Landsman loses her job so she decides to go on a vacation before she walks the pavement looking for work. Sylvia knows she is being foolish as she needs to find a job, but goes off to Italy anyway. In Florence, she meets married American expatriate Henry Stafford in a café; he explains that his wealthy wife is in some remote spot in India visiting her guru.

Henry and Sylvia travel Europe together in his Peugeot that his wife bought him. A classic New York cynical Jew, Sylvia and Henry pass the drives with her telling him amusing tales about her family as well as her shortfalls including the betrayal of her best friend Ruby that ended their friendship. Sylvia secretly hopes Henry will prove her relationship guru, as she lacks the courage to pursue more than they have right now.

THE SCENIC ROUTE is an engaging character study that initially appears to be a series of vignettes, but soon ties into a profound quirky glimpse at two people falling in love, but will either have the courage to take the risky next step. Sylvia is a fascinating protagonist as she explains her failures and that of her family while internally praying Henry will proclaim she is the one; Henry proves a good listener who materialistically has everything but emotionally has little as he prays Sylvia will proclaim he is her one. Fans will appreciate this spin on romance as Binnie Kirshenbaum makes a strong case that it takes a brave soul to open one's heart and as one gets older the courage wanes.

Harriet Klausner

First of all I would read any book where the main characters were Sylvia and Henry mainly because I had an aunt and uncle with those names and they bickered constantly, mostly in public, and were always a source of entertainment for me.
Kirshenbaum's Sylvia and Henry (Henri)are nothing like my aunt and uncle and that's a good thing because I already knew their story.

Binnie Kirshenbaum's "take no prisoners" style of writing gets the reader hooked right from the beginning and doesn't let go even at the end. It lingers on. Her humor is frequent and rapid-fire, situational and never contrived and so obviously spot-on that while often unexpected it constantly fits in and as a reader one knows that nothing else in it's place could be better worded or funnier. Kirshenbaum knows how to place a word, turn a phrase and write a story so different from the "run of the mill" novel that, I, as a reader felt the intimacy as if we were strangers in a strange place and she was telling me a story over cocktails and I never felt the need to interrupt and ask her to explain anything she was saying. While her humor is killer-her understanding of the human psyche and her ability to convey the loneliness, hurt and pain is also a finely honed skill.

Whether Kirshenbaum is writing about family, sex or friendship she is fearless and that is a rare commodity in a writter and even a rarer treat for a reader.

On one level this is a book about a bittersweet mid-life love affair, conducted over the course of a meandering summer road trip through some of the loveliest parts of Eastern and Western Europe, from Florence to Krakow to Prague to Vienna to Ljubljana to Venice, over the Alps and down into France. The cities and the countryside and the romantic hotels are beautifully rendered, and the protagonist/narrator, Sylvia Landsman, is an unforgettable character. Her take-no-prisoners wit and her mordant insights into the deepest strengths and failings of the heart are irresistible, as she recounts to her lover Henry the experiences and anecdotes of a lifetime (and of the many different lives a lifetime contains) to pass their time on the road -- while what clearly is "the time of their lives" passes. But memorable as the story of Sylvia and Henry is, it represents only the surface level of this astonishing novel. The real wonders of this book are to be found in the stories themselves and the way they're told -- a tour-de-force narrative in which the many recurrent threads of memory, personal and historical, weave themselves into an ever-enlarging tapestry that embodies, not just the way memory moves, but the way the heart and mind move in the act of remembering. It's as if what starts as a simple love song -- the plot device of the affair and road trip -- culminates in a symphony, in which the themes of love and death, of time and loss, and all the tributaries of our individual and collective experiences over the course of generations, come together as a profound, and profoundly heartbreaking, meditation on history and what it means to be human. To begin with there's just Sylvia and Henry, sole residents of their own summer Eden; by the end, the circle of their tragic affair has widened to include an extraordinary cast of characters, fictional and historical, all creatures of memory, all inhabitants of a fallen world. One of Kirshenbaum's earlier books was entitled History on a Personal Note: never has that title been more brilliantly realized than in this newly-minted contemporary masterpiece.

What an interesting, complex character has the author created in the person of Sylvia Landsman. At age forty-two, life to this point has been disappointing for Sylvia. Having previously initiated a split in a pleasant-enough marriage, she heads to Europe for an extended vacation after being laid off with severance pay.

Embarking on an almost random journey around Europe, stopping at out-of-the-way places, with Henry, an American southerner who she meets early on, in his Peugeot gives Sylvia a chance to reflect on her life and perhaps satisfy vague yearnings. Henry, a well-to-do man now living in Paris, with wide latitude in an undemanding marriage, accustomed to a leisurely life of fine wine and food, is the perfect sort to listen to Sylvia as she roams back through her life, especially generations of her family. Invariably, subtle insights about life flow from her stories and memories.

In some ways, Sylvia is an elusive individual. It would be hard to describe her physical being. We know her though her contemplations of life. Henry is there to offer the encouraging word at appropriate intervals, pick good restaurants, and represent faint possibilities. One could complain that keeping track of the many relatives gets a bit burdensome. Overall the book flows pretty well and, most importantly, is definitely thought-provoking - worth a reread.

Binnie Kirshenbaum creates small masterpieces which invigorate her readers to read and re-read each novel. In this one she has outdone herself-the charcters are memorable and sympathetic, the setting is, as it should be, a character in the novel, the conflict is specific to this story and, at the same time, universal and, as always with this writer, the wit and the insight and the irony are all present and very much accounted for.

I have loved all her work, especially HESTER AMONG THE RUINS , but I consider this to be her best yet. If you are a reader who loves really fine, intelligent and perceptive writing, don't miss this one.

This is a literate, bitingly-funny, kitschy, read with a panoply of very real characters. A delicious mix of high and low culture and the kind of mid-life insights that arrive when things are no longer black and white, but varying shades of grey. When you are old enough to unshackle yourself from life's certainties.

I loved this book! I bought two copies, one to lend out and one that will never leave my collection. I found the writing to be very honest and truly enjoyed the way she captured the incongruities of thought and behavior that are part of the human condition. The fact that Ms. Kirschenbaum can so clearly sculpt a protagonist that whose lovability and "goodness" seem so malleable (just like a real live person) establishes her virtuosity as a writer. I truly appreciate that honesty, ambiguity, and good storytelling does not have to be relegated to Important Works of Fiction that are horrifically onerous to read.

"The Scenic Route" -- Binnie Kirschenbaum's most recent novel (2009) -- comes across as part memoir and part road trip fiction. The author does a masterful job of melding the two, going back and forth when a recollection of the narrator's family life triggers a reflection about her present situation. The comparisons shed light on both her past and her present, enriching the reader's understanding of both. The story is, indeed, a scenic route through the narrator's life culminating with her extraordinary summer-long affair with the married man on the loose she hooks up with in Florence.

"Here is the story of Henry and me," the novel begins. "I wish it had a different end. It had a good beginning." The reader, then, is left not to wonder how the story will end, but why. The stars were in alignment for Sylvia and Henry when they set off on their frolic through Europe. As the author tells us in the enlightening interview at the end of the book, the lovers' destination was "irrelevant" -- "They don't care where they are going so much as that they are going." So How could two such well matched, happy-go-lucky, middle-aged lovers come at the end to choose the gritty world over the glittery one? As Kirshenbaum puts it in the interview, "fate is not to be escaped."

Kirshenbaum would no more write a novel without lots of good sex than Norman MacLean would write a story about western Montana without a river running through it. The difference between the sex in "The Scenic Route" and that in her early books, e.g. "A Disturbance in One Place "(1994), is that the partners are more worldly now, more languorous, but every bit as ravenous.

Kirshenbaum writes in a voice that shows off her erudition and her disdain for pretentiousness. Here's a sample from Sylvia's reflections about her just ended marriage: "Fiance'. Now there's a word kept aloft by the warm air of an empty head." And how about her definition of shame: "a pyric ember of humiliation ...[which]lodges within the core of us."

This is the second of Kirshenbaum's novels to be published as a Harper Perennial Ecco Press book, a sure sign that she has earned a place for herself as a major American author. If past is prologue, her next book will show her work to even greater advantage.

End note. The "P.S." feature ("insights, interviews & more") is a significant bonus for Ecco Press book readers. It is no wonder then that, in her acknowledgements, Kirshenbaum states "To be published by the Ecco Press is a joy and an honor." Well deserved. Full disclosure. Binnie Kirshenbaum is a friend of a friend.