A compendium of intriguing but uneven dramas posing theological questions.
A collection of religious-themed librettos imagines three versions of the afterlife.
Who knows what awaits people on the other side. In this volume of opera librettos, Lass dramatizes a few possible outcomes. In Severe Passage, Mark, an accomplished academic with a bone to pick with God, meets the angel Gabriel in a void between lives. Gabriel tells Mark that God has decided to grant him three wishes, but the obstinate man refuses them. They argue for a long time about the nature of God’s justice, but when one of Mark’s former loves, Dorothy, arrives in the same void—a recent death by suicide—the stakes of the dispute suddenly get a lot more personal. In The Wrong Heaven, the biblical Lazarus dies, but in the afterlife, he isn’t greeted by his God—the God of the Jews—but rather by Zeus, the god of the Greeks. Zeus is angry at the way humans have treated all the gods. It turns out Zeus is hoping to use Lazarus to get to the figure who has really piqued his interest: Jesus. But as Lazarus goes back and forth between death and life, he learns that he may be a pawn in an even larger game. In The Archaeologists, a group of eponymous excavators unearths artifacts of first-century Israel, a time and place that all of them seem to somehow have visited before. Lass’ verses vary from a philosophical register to a lyrical one, as here where Zeus mocks Lazarus upon his return to the afterlife by describing his cosmic journey: “Back across the horizon / Where the planets are aflame? / Back from the black holes, / Where suns explode / Beyond the latent borders of time? / Back, and riding the pale moon, / Like a wild bull / In a cucumber field?” There are moments in each work that are exciting and thought-provoking, many of which grapple with foundational questions of faith, purpose, and meaning. But as larger pieces, none of them really succeed. Each is concept-driven, with few characters and long arguments, adding up to a rather tedious experience. It’s admirable of the author to ask such big questions, but in doing so, he often loses the human scale of existence.
A compendium of intriguing but uneven dramas posing theological questions.Pub Date: March 22, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-4134-8431-1
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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