by Andrei Codrescu ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
High-flying but somehow unpretentious prose, intellectual fireworks, and more steamy couplings than a shelf’s worth of...
Essayist, deadpan NPR racounteur, and too-infrequent novelist Codrescu (The Blood Countess, 1995, etc.) offers a comedic take on the life of Casanova.
It’s all very well being a legendary ladies’ man, heralded all across Europe and doubtless on other continents as well for acts of shocking bravery in the pursuit of sexual conquests, but what happens when one such as Casanova grows old? Here we find the Chevalier de Seingalt ensconced in a remote Bohemian castle by the grace of his sponsor, Count Waldstein, who has retained Casanova to catalogue his immense library. Giving a mere fraction of his time to the Count’s task, our hero is much more interested in getting on with his own writing and in telling stories. Fortunately for him, serving girl Laura Brock is fascinated by his tales and soon willing to take part in sexual escapades with other servant girls for his observation and enjoyment. As fully packed as the story is with tales of Casanova’s historic trysts—including rendezvous with Venetian convent girls and the seduction of a 300-woman harem—it makes a point of illustrating just how exaggerated the Chevalier’s already-impressive exploits had become even in his own lifetime. The plot is not much more than a thin rigging upon which Codrescu can hoist a multitude of erotic flashbacks, stories-within-stories, and commentaries on religion, philosophy, sex, and the changing tides of history in 18th-century Europe. While the author is obviously enamored of his subject, Codrescu never tries to make Casanova out to be more than he is (unlike, for example, Doug Wright’s worshipful treatment of the Marquis de Sade in the play Quills). Though the narrative never turns a blind eye to the casual violence of its day, this is ultimately a fun and sexy romp through a libertine’s freely fictionalized life. Consider it the bastard child of Anne Rice’s erotica and Umberto Eco’s philosophical meta-fiction.
High-flying but somehow unpretentious prose, intellectual fireworks, and more steamy couplings than a shelf’s worth of romance novels: altogether, a potent dose of high-literary eroticism.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86800-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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