Erudite and graceful, but this one somehow loses its point halfway through, running on and on to no apparent end.
From Welsh novelist Wall (The School of Night, 2002, etc.), an odd, meandering account of a wayward seminarian’s attempts to uncover the mysteries surrounding a mad 18th-century poet,.
With the solitary exception of Stalin, seminary dropouts rarely go on to achieve much in the way of worldly success. Christopher Bayliss is a case in point: a meek and tentative Englishman, Christopher spent several years in Rome preparing for his ordination only to chuck it all at the last minute with no very clear idea of what he would do instead. He returned to Britain and enrolled as a graduate student at Leeds, where he began to research the life of one Richard Pelham, an obscure poet of the Augustan Age as renowned in his own time for his madness as for his verse. Christopher finds Pelham at once repellent and fascinating, and he continues his investigations even after quarreling with his adviser and dropping out of the university. He becomes a sales rep with a printing firm that specializes in making reproductions of museum prints, eventually rises to director of the company, then gets forced out when his immediate supervisor is found to be a swindler and embezzler. After he’s injured in a car crash, Christopher goes home to live with his mother and continue his research while living on his disability benefits. As he delves deeper into the life of Pelham, he becomes convinced that the man suffered not from madness but from demonic possession, and Christopher finds himself pressed once more into the deepest recesses of Catholic theology as he attempts to make some sense of the poor man’s maladies. But eventually the question arises: Is Christopher trying to understand Pelham, or himself? The demons that have possessed Christopher may not require exorcism, but they do demand a long-postponed coming to terms with his past. Sooner or later, a reckoning will need to be made.
Erudite and graceful, but this one somehow loses its point halfway through, running on and on to no apparent end.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28772-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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