Rococo worldbuilding and sci-fi fantasy for the adventurous reader, relayed in language and description bordering on the...
As an incredible realm sinks deeper and deeper into anarchy and warfare, a strange group of pilgrims embarks on an enigmatic mission.
Bennudriti, a professed admirer of cult fantasy writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake, makes his debut with this ambitious, fabulist sci-fi tale, the first in a series. He introduces the world of Naraia, a mix of distant past and remote future. While dirigibles and flying-fortress airships ply the skies and computer technology comes in liquid (and injectable) form, the streets and cities often devolve into wretched hives of scum and villainy. After the ruinous War of the Rupture, a corrupt society subsists under the unsteady regime of the Talgo warlord dynasty, having lost most ethical precepts of a messiah/prophet named “Salt Mystic” from 2,000 years ago (this Christ equivalent is one of the more accessible notions). Suddenly there appears a cocky troublemaker named Ring, on an esoteric quest to five unspoken destinations while warning his fellow travelers that it’s going to get “messy.” Ring recruits Misling, a young “Recorder,” whose sect follows and memorizes the deeds of the great and noteworthy to provide a full, immutable history. Misling violates the Recorder neutrality creed badly, as all-devouring nanoparticle bombs suddenly attack cities, terrifying synthetic plagues make ordinary folks homicidal lunatics, and invading hordes of a sadistic warrior nation called Red Witch suddenly appear. But the Red Witch combatants are hired mercenaries—so who is the prime evildoer at work? As events careen toward civil war, there may not even be a mastermind, just societal collapse, purges, and the culmination of age-old prophecies. Readers who want their plotlines proceeding from A to B will likely be lost in a snarl of undefined terminology and Bennudritian argot (“Although all flatrunner sailors were considered a bit mad in those days, feverishly electrostatic charges ripped from the very salt of the cotton-white flats, scouts like Munchy would be the first to tell of furious smoking skirmishes in the shimmering borderlands of his patrol”). It’s still a grand moment when digitally programmed tornadoes are unleashed as weapons of mass destruction. Good luck, however, figuring out (in this go-around, anyhow) what all the fighting and scheming is about. The title of a documentary about William Gibson comes to mind: No Maps for These Territories.
Rococo worldbuilding and sci-fi fantasy for the adventurous reader, relayed in language and description bordering on the experimental.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-55348-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
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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