A protracted parable about finding your true nature while on the road to strange places.
A debut novel offers a nestled allegory about a soul-awakening journey.
In this tale, a man named Jack Burchell is living in the bleakly regimented world of 2059, a world still reeling from the wars of the 2040s that “changed everything and set the earth on a new trajectory.” Burchell works facelessly for a multinational corporation. One day he defies his supervisors and visits his personal storage space, where he finds an old book that turns out to be his grandfather’s secret memoir, an account of a long walking adventure his grandfather and a friend named Khalid took, forsaking the horror-haunted land of Ennuied. In Ennuied, all life is organized around a plant called “fodder grass” (in a typically philosophical digression, Burchell's grandfather thinks, “I suppose all people have something like fodder grass, those most important things they grew up with and were told will meet their needs”). Ennuied is a dark, repressive, spider-haunted place, and Khalid and Burchell’s grandfather leave it without much compunction, heading into a broader world in which beautiful music wafts through the forests and time seems to lose its value. They encounter a variety of people and places in the course of their journeys, and the sentiment of one of the folks they meet, “we all know that we simply need to follow our heart,” becomes the theme running through their adventures. In clear and energetic prose, Braun poses one thinly veiled allegory after another about the various kinds of places seekers tend to find. The two friends meet many different types of fellow travelers on the road, and they reach a variety of lands and cities, from regimented Officium to solipsistic Heureux, each as stylized and dramatic as Ennueid. All of this—as well as the increasingly enigmatic companionship of Khalid—provokes in Burchell a series of reassessments of his life and preoccupations. Any reader who’s ever gone backpacking without a plan will likely nod at many of the realizations Braun describes in these pages.
A protracted parable about finding your true nature while on the road to strange places.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7239-8
Page Count: 270
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 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 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
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