A probing and provocative examination of the experience of love as the mind and body approach old age, by the eminent British author best known for The Golden Notebook, her classic depiction of woman's fate (which this new novel intermittently evokes and resembles). Sarah Durham is 65, long widowed and freed of most family responsibilities. Yet she's burdened by the needs of her teenaged niece Joyce (whose parents virtually abandon her to Sarah's care), and also handles a demanding job as all-purpose manager (and sometime writer and director) with a thriving London theater. A play in production, Julie Vairon, requires Sarah to research the life and work of its title character, a beautiful quadroon girl from Martinique whom various men loved to distraction and who spent the last years of her brief life in France, where she became an accomplished composer and a famous diarist. The image of this mysterious woman's mingled happiness and despair reawakens in Sarah feelings long suppressed, as do the flirtations of a handsome young actor who joins the play's cast, as well as the more comfortable (though no less erotic) presence of its 35-year-old director, a man irrevocably committed to his family. We feel throughout this absorbing story—told both from Sarah's viewpoint and in its author's confident omniscient voice—the pressure of a preternaturally keen analytical intelligence, making every vividly dramatized scene resonate with judicious commentary. The web of sensation, emotion, and fantasy that all but overpowers Sarah during her reawakening is woven with clarity and force, and when Lessing frankly describes Sarah's sexual rekindling, you almost feel the heat rising off the pages. Lessing is a contemporary George Eliot, an intellectual whose imagination is firmly grounded in the sensual life and the natural world. Love, Again is a triumphant vindication of her literary method.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017687-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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