The earnest, prone-to-ramble Ripley—of the oft-panned Scarlett, the sequel to Gone with the Wind, plus many others- -tackles a challenging, somewhat obscure subject here with distinctly mixed results. The first three-quarters of this epic comprise a carefully researched, minutely detailed and imaginatively conceived (it is, after all, fictional) ``biography'' of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave his burial site for the crucified Jesus of Nazareth and is credited with spreading Christianity to England and beyond. From the opening, when Joseph—a Jew and the son of a farmer—dreams as a 12-year-old of life as a traveler, then eventually marries his childhood companion Sarah, and still later goes on to highly successful business ventures transporting tin from far-off lands to King Herod's castles at Caesarea, Ripley is in control of her material and tells a gripping tale of an unfamiliar time with only a few lapses into anachronistic language. But the last quarter of the story—in which Joseph must face the aftermath of his friendship with the emperor Augustus (whom he befriended via Herod), the evil machinations of Sejanus the Jew Hater, the trials of Herod's son Herod Agrippa, the deaths of his beloved Sarah and wise old grandmother Rebekkah, the miseries of his only daughter Ella (who was born with useless legs)—moves at a ludicrously fast pace, as though the author realized at end that she still had a great deal of ground to cover. As a result, when Joseph finally encounters Jesus of Nazareth, who heals Ella's legs with a single kind phrase and begins his crucial mission of conversion, his words and newfound beliefs have more the superficial tone of the modern- day televangelist than they do the ringing certainties of a true believer. More detail about Joseph and his time—real and imagined—than many may have imagined wanting, but with the significant exception of her weakened conclusion, Ripley makes this informative read also entertaining. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-446-51691-0
Page Count: 704
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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