A celebration of the dysfunctional that will keep readers turning pages.
The latest offering from conceptual artist, writer, and performer Rosenthal (Soul & Psyche, 1998, etc.) is a satirical, fantastical, and philosophical novel, illustrated with surreal photographs.
Readers begin the story with Jack Rubin, a messianic figure who has unbelievable charisma, even as a graduate student. But he’s also at least mildly schizophrenic (hearing “The Voice of the Petty Accuser”) and cares much more for his ideas and ideals than for real people. He aims to usher in a perfect world or die trying. The story then adds in his girlfriend, Beatrice Stregasanta Madregiore, a blind African-American conceptual artist (specializing in “Avant-Conceptualism…in large scale public projects and theatrical events”) with fiercely devoted students. She eventually marries Jack off to one of those students, the seriously disturbed Caroline Klein. Over the course of the story, set from 1968 to 1985, Jack and Caroline marry and beget a daughter, Jewel Marie Rubin; Jack becomes world-renowned and eventually the United Nations’ secretary-general; and Caroline, high and hysterical most of the time, has a serious car accident, scarring Jewel horribly (and Jack urges against her getting plastic surgery). Beatrice, Jewel’s godmother, takes Jewel to Rome, her spiritual retreat, and contemplates seducing her. Also in Rome, there’s Toto, a local cab driver, schemer, kidnapper, and autograph hound who picks up the two women before Beatrice experiences an apparent miracle. Later, Jack, flying into the same city, faces a tragedy of his own in the DaVinci Airport. These are the major pivot points for the plot, and Rosenthal, a very clever writer, molds it all into an addictive story. Her chapters are mostly short with quirky titles (such as “Caroline Parks Car and Walks Back Alone”), and they often act as stand-alone narrative disquisitions. We see the world sometimes through Jack’s eyes, sometimes through Caroline’s, Beatrice’s, or Toto’s, and most rivetingly, through Jewel’s. Caroline behaves monstrously to poor Jewel, but readers will find that they can’t take their eyes away. They’ll also sometimes wonder what’s real and what’s not—and exactly what kind of magic might be at work.
A celebration of the dysfunctional that will keep readers turning pages.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937739-92-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Deadly Chaps Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
