An irresistible amalgam of Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Conrad at their very best. Masterful.
A rattling good story, complex characterizations, and a brilliantly realized portrayal of an alien culture—all combine to dazzling effect in this first by a California medical student who has worked and studied in the Far East.
In mild-mannered London, 1886–87, piano tuner Edgar Drake is persuaded by the British War Office to travel to Mandalay and beyond, during the third of a succession of Anglo-Burmese Wars, to fulfill a strange request from an army surgeon-major serving in Burma. Drake has been chosen to tune an Erard (French-made) grand piano for Dr. Anthony Carroll, a pacifist iconoclast who has set about winning over warring tribes by introducing their souls to music and poetry while healing broken bodies. Reasoning that “if we are to make these people our subjects, must we not present the best of European civilization?,” Drake undertakes his arduous journey (thrillingly described), eventually arriving at the inland fortress of Mae Lwin, where the suave Carroll—part Albert Schweitzer, part Mistah Kurtz of Heart of Darkness—rules as a benevolent despot, aided in ways that aren’t quite clear by a beautiful Burmese woman, Khin Myo, to whom Edgar finds himself increasingly attracted. A wealth of specific information—musical, medical, historical, political—and numerous colorfully detailed vignettes of life in Burma’s teeming cities and jungle villages provide a solid context for the increasingly intricate plot, which brings Drake into “complicity” with Carroll’s visionary dream of reconciling various native factions and brokering a peace that surrenders only “limited autonomy” to them. Until the powerful dénouement, that is, when Drake discovers the manner in which he himself has been “played” as an instrument, and—in a deeply ironic climactic action—becomes the insubordinate “liberator.” (One keeps thinking of what a marvelous movie The Piano Tuner might make. There’s a perfect part for Jeremy Irons.)
An irresistible amalgam of Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Conrad at their very best. Masterful.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41465-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
PROFILES
Much is made in these pages about the power of make-believe, and while the book falls short of magical, it’s still an...
The story behind the story that became the legendary movie The Wizard of Oz.
Letts (The Perfect Horse, 2016, etc.) builds her historical novel around Maud Gage Baum, the high-spirited wife of L. Frank Baum, who wrote the original Wizard of Oz books. In one of two intercut narratives, the 77-year-old Maud, who’d exerted a strong influence on her late husband, appears on the set of the movie in 1938; there, she encounters 16-year-old Judy Garland—cast as Dorothy—among others. The second narrative opens in Fayetteville, New York, in 1871 and traces Maud’s life from age 10: her girlhood as the daughter of an ardent suffragette; her brief time at Cornell University—she was one of the first women admitted there; her early marriage to Baum, an actor at the time; and the births of their four sons. Frank, a dreamer, was not so talented at making money, and the family endured a hardscrabble, peripatetic life until he scored as a writer. This part of the story is dramatic and sometimes-poignant, though it goes on a bit. (Read carefully, and you can spot some elements that made their ways into the books and movie.) The Hollywood part is more entertaining even if some of it feels implausible. Maud did meet Judy Garland and attend the premiere of the film in real life. But in the book she tries to protect and nurture Garland, who was at the mercy of her abusive stage mother and the filmmakers and was apparently fed amphetamines to keep her weight down. And while it’s true the movie’s best-loved song, “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” was almost cut at the last minute, the book has Maud persuading studio chief L.B. Mayer to keep it in.
Much is made in these pages about the power of make-believe, and while the book falls short of magical, it’s still an absorbing read.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-62210-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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