A gorgeous journey to nowhere.
Fascinated by an idealized version of Italy he imagines from literature and art, a young gay man goes through the motions of a mundane life in the1990s, while sleep deprivation causes vivid dreams that blend strangely with reality.
Jeffers’ fuguelike story elevates everyday people and places to the fantastical with beautifully evocative language and detailed descriptions. In passages that move smoothly between being microscopically focused and dreamily abstract, the fantastical elements are grounded by the language’s simplicity, leaving the reader equally intrigued by an Italian child prince and a bar near Fenway. Various people—some more real than others—try to guide and control rootless Ben: dark, beautiful Dario and his siblings, who moved from a Boston warehouse to Dario’s small apartment in Providence; bike messenger and artist Neddy, who claims Ben as his lover after running into him; straight friend Kenneth, who offers Ben a place to live in Boston as well as a strangely shifting intimacy; Ben’s mother, who caricatures their family in her novels; his father, who comes out to Ben and begs for support as his marriage falls apart; and his old Spanish teacher Paulo, whose upcoming visit to Boston causes Ben to re-evaluate their connection. At the same time Ben is perhaps creating these people, they help define him. Everyone seems to have moments when they’re real and moments when they’re fantasy; even dreams have agendas and needs to push upon Ben. Jeffers’ story achieves its goal of being a literary, self-aware novel about living reactively and without agency, and it only occasionally falls into academic strangeness or aimlessness. An exquisite flow of language ensures that the narrative doesn’t get lost even as Ben drifts.
A gorgeous journey to nowhere.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1590210925
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An attempt to share personal experiences of discrimination and prejudice hampered by a distancing style.
An Afghan refugee’s account of his attempts to understand himself, his history and his homeland as he makes his way in a world he perceives to be hostile to his heritage.
The author fled Afghanistan with his family, only to fail to find the happiness and freedom he anticipated in India and then Germany, where he went to study architecture. Ahmadi delivers an account of continually facing prejudice, hatred and a loneliness that, in his mind, resulted from his “ethnic” status in an unenlightened, ignorant society. Ahmadi is well read, ambitious and clearly intelligent. Yet it’s hard to know how much of his negative experience is hyperbole and how much stems from his own actions. The story he paints is one of a victim constantly persecuted and belittled by nearly everyone, unfairly denied the grades, housing and even female companionship he’s due because of cold German society’s hatred for his ethnicity. Yet Ahmadi’s behavior often seems self-righteous, pugnacious and, by his own description, aggressive. Hung on a thin plot that serves as a framework for pages of ideological and political discussions, the narrative is complicated by convoluted verbiage: “But I then often wonder whether this retrospective saddling of environment to explain the twofold delusion of boundless euphoria and expansive amnesia is as tenable a notion as I would like it to be, even if at its face value the thesis seems to explicate marvelously the mysterious lull of normalcy which all of a sudden appeared to have befallen my personal life.” Further hampered by confusing homophones—“that chili evening” and “one’s piers in school”—litanies of questions and exclamations and overuse of italic and boldface text, the story is often exhausting to read.
An attempt to share personal experiences of discrimination and prejudice hampered by a distancing style.Pub Date: May 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468594713
Page Count: 280
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
All the fun of a children’s book, coupled with the razor-sharp wit and potent insight that seasoned readers crave.
Magnusson’s debut YA fantasy follows a young boy’s flight from the wrath of bullies, taking him to another world from which there may be no escape.
On the run from bullies, new kid at school Stewart seeks refuge down a storm drain. He winds up lost in a maze of pipes until he steps out into a lush forest and the drain pipe entrance disappears. He encounters Cora, a young girl who takes him to a city hidden behind a great wall. Inside are only children, guided by a book written by the Forebears—the previous inhabitants—and fearing the tall, vicious Venators outside. The venerated book prophesizes a devastating final battle, but Stewart only wants a look at its pages in hopes of finding a way home. Magnusson’s novel is an allegory: The Venators, who merely beat their prey in lieu of killing them, are equated with bullies, while the children, who never age, are the perpetual embodiment of innocence. But Magnusson infuses the narrative with stunning imagery that wallops the senses—the cacophony of a construction site as Stewart passes by or the multitude of colors in the forest. Some of the descriptions are made all the more authentic through the impressionable eyes of a child: Stewart likens the landscape to emerald green ice cream covered with candy. Ample action and suspense, including the predicted conflict between the city and its skeletal enemies, help the plot retain a steady speed. The best moments involve Cora and Stewart running through the forest, dodging the Venators; the book even opens with Stewart midsprint. Despite a theme geared for younger readers and the unmistakable moral lesson of facing one’s fears head-on, the author surprises with somber, mature dialogue, as when the Princeps, the city’s female leader, states bluntly, “[W]e are fairly confident that we are no longer on the planet Earth.” For good measure, there are also talking animals, a protagonist who’s more than deserving of a cheering audience and a bittersweet ending, with a slightly greater emphasis on the sweet.
All the fun of a children’s book, coupled with the razor-sharp wit and potent insight that seasoned readers crave.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0984861057
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Olivander Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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