Two unusual and intermittently powerful novellas from acclaimed Egyptian writer Qasim (1935-90), once a notorious member of his country's ``sixties generation.'' Qasim was imprisoned and then exiled by the Nasser regime for left-wing political activism. His writing accordingly grew less openly confrontational, and his later works, including these, focus on characters whose lives are defined less by politics than by the principles and imperatives of Islam. In ``Al-Mahdi'' (1977), a village riddled by the feuding of two prominent families becomes the setting for the forced conversion to Islam of a terrified Coptic (Christian) umbrella maker and his impoverished family. Other forms of seduction and coercion are explored intriguingly (if inconclusively) in two secondary stories: those of the lustful mayor's thwarted pursuit of his lissome housemaid, and of a gentle young man's sexual surrender to a zealous Muslim preacher. The book surveys an impressively wide social terrain with commendable economy, and its grasp of sectarian dynamics infuses the narrative with energy as it moves toward a surprising dramatic conclusion. ``Good News from the Afterlife'' (1981) offers parallel descriptions of a scholarly and dutiful young man's devotion to his dying grandfather, and the grandfather's death, burial, and dreamlike entry into ``the world of the absolute.'' The grandfather in death is granted an unobstructed vision of his past life. In fact, the tale becomes mired in doctrinal minutiae, particularly in such sequences as the deceased's submissive conversation with two rather pedantic Angels of Death. Not that there aren't marvelous momentssuch as Qasim's ingenious presentation of the sensations of entombment and decay, and this image of the grandson's percipient devotion: ``Perhaps he sensed his grandfather at night, when he was sleeping, between the love of his mother and father.'' Maybe a bit remote from Western readersbut there's more than Mahfouz in modern Egyptian fiction, and it's good to have Qasim's work among us.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56639-353-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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