With his detached, eminently humane, honest, and bitingly funny narration, Fred makes an unerringly entertaining...
Vibrant, amusing tale from film director/author Dörrie (What Do You Want From Me?, 1991, etc.) limns a richly entertaining midlife crisis, which takes a faithless husband to a Buddhist retreat in France.
Fred is not in search of enlightenment, however, and seems an unlikely candidate for Eastern religion. He has been assigned by his wife, Claudia, to ensure that their teenaged daughter, Franka, does not run off to India with her lover, a scholar of Buddhism named Pelge. Fred leaves Munich, his lover, and his chain of eateries behind to travel with Franka to meet Pelge. His daughter immediately blends into the community and disappears, while Fred is assigned a “family” with whom he will spend the next few TV-, caffeine-, and smoke-free days. They are, as might be expected, torturous for self-indulgent Fred, but the peace gives him time to reflect on his marriage. The spark went out of it some indistinct time ago; now Claudia is a devoted Buddhist, performing nightly prostrations for world peace instead of cuddling with Fred. At the retreat, he meets lovely Antje, who confides that she’s here because her husband, Theo, has fallen in love with a student of Buddhism, and she wants to discover the religion’s appeal. It turns out that Theo, a member of Fred’s retreat “family,” is the man who inspired Claudia to try Buddhism, and indeed the two have become lovers. In some delightful sketches, Fred good-naturedly but sarcastically observes the retreat’s rituals. Then he witnesses Theo’s sudden death and realizes this sojourn has changed him. Fred wishes Franka luck in India, drives grieving Antje home to Amsterdam, declines to donate sperm to a pair of hospitable lesbians, and en route to Munich saves the life of a motorist on the autobahn
With his detached, eminently humane, honest, and bitingly funny narration, Fred makes an unerringly entertaining companion—and he even finds wisdom in Buddhist teachings, despite his best efforts to remain crass and ironic.Pub Date: July 10, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-151-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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