A desperate tale of love and heroism, set mostly in Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge, from the Australian author of the novel and classic independent film The Year of Living Dangerously (1979). As the story opens in 1976, Mike Langford, a Tasmanian photojournalist whose war coverage has become internationally famous, is reported dead inside Cambodia. Almost simultaneously, back in peaceful Tasmania, Langford's oldest friend—known here only as Ray—receives a collection of tapes that Langford recorded over the years, an ``audio diary'' chronicling his career from his apprentice days in Singapore through his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian civil war that followed. Using the tapes, Ray tells his old friend's story, letting the tale fall into the third person even as he flies to Thailand to find out what happened. We never learn of Langford's fate with certainty, however, since Koch opts to transform him into a mythical figure, an eternal soldier. Part of Langford's tragedy is that in midlife he at last finds a woman he deeply loves, but she, like everything else that might have addressed the sorrow that he has borne since his terrible childhood, will be taken from him. She is Cambodian and opposes the Khmer Rouge; Langford probably perishes trying to extract her from danger. Also figuring prominently is Langford's Chinese friend Jim Feng, who reveres Langford for his fearlessness and honesty. Koch's Australian perspective is illuminating and fresh throughout, but his best scenes are inside Cambodia, as Langford tries to get the word out about the Khmer Rouge holocaust at a time when most Western journalists are in denial. The evocation of the Cambodian landscape, strewn with bodies, is truly haunting. Koch's complicated point of view seems mechanical at times, but on the whole he's given us an absorbing, deeply moving story. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86155-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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