Tigers in Red Weather

The debut novel of the great writer Herman Melville’s great-great-granddaughter is compared to another classic novel—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” An island in the Atlantic—an enchanting summer place with summer houses, tennis, and cocktails on the lawns. Beautiful, broken people against the backdrop of a magnificent landscape drifting in haze. Cousins Nick and Helena have been connected since childhood; the old house of Tiger House, where they always spent their summers, is for them a symbol of happiness. But childhood is gone, just as happiness is gone. Just after the war that took Helena’s beloved and broke something in the relationship between Nick and her fiancé. Yet young women believe that all troubles are behind them. Still, the gilding of their artificial happiness will soon crack. Helena’s husband will turn out not to be the man he seemed, and Hughes has returned from the war completely faded out. Every summer Nick and Helena spend on the Island, at Tiger House, trying to recreate that long-ago feeling of happiness. Sharp-tongued and desperate Nick can’t understand the apathy deeper and deeper engulfing soft, indecisive Helena, who has tied her life to a strange man from Hollywood. Both of them constantly feel that death is always nearby—that it has only granted them a brief respite. Behind the facade of idyllic cottage life lie fears, secret desires, and dangerous feelings. “Tigers in Red” is a family drama and a sensual psychological novel with beautiful heroes and an unexpectedly warm atmosphere. Liza Klausmann pieces together, like a mosaic, an elegiac and тревожну story in which storm clouds swell above the sunlit Island—and soon the fragile paradise will be at the very center of the storm.