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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
