A brainy, fast-moving thriller about memory and identity.
Tasked with investigating a young woman who has forgotten her identity, a man uncovers connections to a secret society.
“Tycoon’s son in brawl,” reads the caption accompanying a photo of Jack Simonetti’s latest escapade. Young, handsome, idle and dependent on his father Leon’s wealth, Jack has no recourse when ordered from New York to London to help out Leon’s old friend Daniel Barone, whose ward, Jenilee, disappeared and lost her memory. Found after more than two years (and now calling herself Eloise Blake), she wants nothing to do with her well-appointed old life; instead, she prefers the dangerous game of living by her wits and practicing “free running,” or parcours. Also a parcoursist, Jack is enjoined by Barone to win Eloise’s trust and convince her to return home. Eloise is suspicious: She’s tormented by hallucinations, half-memories and obsessively remembered numbers, but after Jack saves her life, she accepts his aid. As the two investigate, they uncover links to a secret scientific/mystical society, the Order of Mnemosyne, whose members included Daniel, Leon and Eloise’s mother. The Order ran hubristic experiments that seem connected to Eloise’s current memory problems—but someone wants these memories to remain forgotten, putting her in danger. South African novelist Mostert (Season of the Witch, 2013, etc.) brings together fascinating strands of biology, psychology and mysticism, with astute observations on memory, the past, identity and love. The well-described parcours scenes nicely capture the sport’s dynamic flow—a perfect fit for Eloise’s live-in-the-moment ethos: “Never slow down. If a movement doesn’t work out, don’t agonise over the recovery; just move your body forward. Movement is life. That was what parkour was all about.” Jack’s development from self-centered rich kid to self-sacrificing lover is believably handled, paralleling his growing respect for Eloise’s right and ability to make her own decisions. Mostert skillfully ups the ante with suspenseful episodes of danger leading to a climactic rooftop scene.
A brainy, fast-moving thriller about memory and identity.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1909965201
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Portable Magic Ltd
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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