A gracefully rendered, beautifully characterized tale about an unusual life: Jae-Suk Lee is a writer to watch.
A lyrically evocative, haunting first novel follows an aged Korean War vet and drifter as he returns to the sweet-bitter Montana home of his youth.
With one good eye and little memory after receiving a gunshot wound to the head (probably self-inflicted, but he doesn’t remember), Gabriel has found his way back to the ranch country of Thalo Valley after 40 years absence. Owning nothing but the clothes on his back, whiskey, and a satchel containing a letter from his past he can’t read, Gabe aims to reclaim his place at the sheep ranch where he brought a Korean peasant girl home after the war as a way of making amends for being involved in the American “potshot” killing of fleeing refugees at No Gun Ri. Now in her mid-50s, tormented by spooky superstitions and a bossy, promiscuous teenaged daughter who runs the ranch, the Korean woman (called Yahng Yi’s Mother because Gabe can’t remember her name) has been waiting for Gabe all these years, determined that his return, like his saving her in Korea, is palcha—fate. Yet Gabe can’t remember their love, but only an earlier time, before the war, when he loved the owner of the ranch, Emily Cottage, who has since died under suspicious circumstances. Complicating things is the hostility of hot-blooded daughter Yahng Yi, the scourge of the randy local cowherds, who makes him think, more sorrowfully than lustfully, of the young and lovely Emily. The writing here is deft and moving, offering vivid description of both the Montana setting and the remembered Korean landscape. As the details of Gabe’s memory begin to fill in—the relationships among the inhabitants of Thalo Valley are murky and incestuous—the novel proves eerily suspenseful, ending on a redemptive note.
A gracefully rendered, beautifully characterized tale about an unusual life: Jae-Suk Lee is a writer to watch.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-882593-94-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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