More period exotica by the author of such languorous entertainments as Interview with a Vampire and The Feast of All Saints: this time Rice explores the musical demiworld of the 18th-century castrati—those flute-voiced, angelic singers who as boys were "mutilated to make a choir of seraphim, their song a cry to heaven that heaven did not hear." The star of this terrible show is primo Tonio Treschi—but before his entrance there's the sadly common-place history of Tonio's teacher/lover Guido Maffeo, a peasant child, castrated at six for the sake of heavenly music, who loses his voice at 17 but finally settles down to gifted teaching and composition at the Castrati music school in Naples. And it's at about this time in Venice that handsome 15-year-old Tonio, son of the patrician Andrea and young melancholy Marianna, finds his life shadowed and then threatened when he learns that his "dead" half-brother Carlo is very much alive: after Andrea's death, the sinister, disinherited Carlo (who is really Tonio's father!) neatly eliminates Tonio by ordering his abduction and castration. So, forced to announce publicly that this was his own decision to save his beautiful singing voice, Tonio arrives at Guido's conservatory, nearly insane with rage and grief. But on the flanks of Mount Vesuvius he accepts two tasks: a) he swears Revenge on Carlo; b) he will continue to sing up a storm. And later he will ponder his sexual identity with: Guido, a life-long love; gentle feline boys; "masculine" men—including a learned Roman Cardinal; and then the lovely Christina Grimaldi, a painter. Thus, Tonio probes the essence of maleness and femaleness: ". . . if I were part of one or the other or even part of both." And finally it will be Tonio's transvestite allure—he is at last persuaded to take a female role in Guido's opera—that will inch Carlo to his doom. . . in a marvelously shuddering showdown. Rice has convincingly reconstructed performance and training highlights in this era of ornamental vocalization; and the dialogue, assassin-filled plot, and erotica moments all oom-pah away to a splendidly flowery operatic tempo—con amore, con brio, con carnage.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1982
ISBN: 0099471388
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
PERSPECTIVES
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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