Highly atmospheric, transporting account of an ancient custom alive in a modern world.
Kaya tells a tale of revenge as a way of life, and how it can eat away at a man.
Ramzi Ozcomert lived his first 14 years in northeastern Turkey. In the middle of the 20th century, it is a place that feels much older, obsessed with the idea of honor–family honor, blood honor and revenge. Ramzi’s father embodies the code and instills it in his son. As drawn by Kaya, the elder Ozcomert is radiant, but not altogether good. He is scarily unflinching, as only those who do not wrestle with doubt can be. Then revenge rears its head to shatter Ramzi’s curiously fascinating, feudal world–he must flee or be taken victim by the same wrath that wiped out his family. Kaya fashions this world with exactingness–the vendettas, enemies everywhere, the artful social dance one had to comply with, or live constantly looking over their shoulder. Young Ramzi is put on a train to Istanbul where he has a delightfully Hitchcockian encounter with a small group of enigmatic souls debating the rift in Turkish society: “We are men of conscience. If someone violates one’s honor, murder is justified,” says one, while another responds, “Our republic is supposed to be a democracy, but our people still think in the old ways.” Any uncertainties about Ramzi’s inclinations are put to rest when, in one of the book’s mildly disconcerting jumps, readers next find him in London. It is 13 years later, and he is in love and studying engineering, but unfinished business back home lurks in the background. As a successful businessman in Los Angeles, some 20 years later still, revenge consumes him. “Coward. Coward,” says the voice in his head. Apparently you can take the village, but not the code, out of the man. Kaya is a dramatist and his love scenes are chromatic and ecstatic before revenge lowers the skies, and everything goes dark and edgy. “Vengeance only destroys,” says Ramzi’s friend in the end. And how.
Highly atmospheric, transporting account of an ancient custom alive in a modern world.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4490-1453-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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