by Anonymous ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2014
A potentially controversial reimagining of history and religion.
Religion, history and autobiography intertwine in Anonymous’ (Holy Ghost, 2009, etc.) latest novel.
This book’s central premise mixes fact with fiction, and Eastern spirituality with Western religious tradition, in an intriguing retelling of historical events. The story centers on the mysterious figure of Cristo, whose journey spans three separate lifetimes across multiple centuries. Readers first see him as a wayward youth living in the ancient Middle East, after having spurned his family and faith in search of a higher spiritual purpose. His travels bring him to India, where he first practices Hinduism and later experiences a profound vision while reflecting on a statue of Siddhartha. Inspired by his vision, he returns to his home, dedicated to creating a new religion, and becomes the figure known as Jesus Christ. Following his crucifixion, Cristo is reborn as Christopher Columbus and trades his spiritual ambitions for those of wealth and power in the New World. The semiautobiographical final passages place a version of the author in the role of Cristo, with his novels precipitating a worldwide revolution. The book reinterprets the characters of Christ and Columbus as complicated, ambitious figures, in ways that stray from traditional depictions. This unorthodoxy also shows in the author’s narrative style, which eschews dialogue and traditional structure, allowing him to ruminate at length on the novel’s recurring themes. These passages offer some evocative language (“It seems that history in the Bible and in the textbooks crowned the glory of the lord with the black powder and sharp saber”), but also confuse the narrative, and often read like conspiracy theories. References to the New World Order, the 9/11 attacks, and “how twenty million people could control the world’s banking with usury and control the media world” may offend readers as much as they confuse them, and make the novel’s second half difficult to reconcile with the first.
A potentially controversial reimagining of history and religion.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1628579772
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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