Funny, humane, and sympathetic to the silly creatures we humans are. The Dalai Lama himself would probably approve.
Ever goofy, ever surreal French novelist Volodine (Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, 2015, etc.) rewrites the rules of Tibetan Buddhism, using characters that might have been drafted from the second string of Waiting for Godot.
Bardo, as Laurie Anderson’s recent film Heart of a Dog reminds us, is a kind of limbo where the dead await reincarnation for seven weeks, a place where nothing much happens while the soul gathers its wits and chooses its next earthly vehicle. Volodine turns this on its head: plenty happens, even if the departed can’t quite suss it out. “The Bardo,” says one Babloïev by way of helpful explanation to the recently dead Glouchenko. “The intermediary world. We’re going to float and walk around here for forty-nine days.” Unimpressed, Glouchenko, apparently a devotee of slang, replies, “Cut the crap. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think you can just jerk me around.” It turns out, as another intermediary, Mario Schmunk, notes, that poor Glouchenko has been dead for four weeks and, thick as he is, still hasn’t gotten around to realizing it, prompting a mysterious voice to cut through the fog: “It is high time that you liberate yourself, Glouchenko! Make an effort, Glouchenko!” Glouchenko is not an effortful fellow, though, which may just get him reborn as a monkey. Neither are some of the other denizens of the Bardo, some of whom take Bardo as an excuse to have a nice nap. In this vignette-layered novel, Volodine explores a fruitful premise throughout, namely, that if some of our lives are thoughtlessly lived and some of our deaths downright embarrassing, why should not death be thoughtless and shameface-making? Just ask Big Grümscher and Little Blumschi, “the kings of laughter,” clowns who aren’t laughing so much now that the monks are shouting out sutras from the Book of the Dead….
Funny, humane, and sympathetic to the silly creatures we humans are. The Dalai Lama himself would probably approve.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940953-33-5
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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