A brilliant debut skillfully blends creation myth and folk tale with subtle criticisms of both depersonalized technological advancement and the kind of insularity that breeds and overvalues both tradition and ignorance. Barton’s ingenious tale takes the form of an autobiographical document written by the eponymous Yves, a farmer in the landlocked village of Mandragora, which initially seems—by virtue of place and personal names—to be located somewhere in eastern Europe during the late Middle Ages. But, we soon learn, the land beyond Mandragora’s neighboring mountains lies across a body of water from Scotland; the period is actually an approximate present time when US Navy aircraft fly nearby; and Mandragorans compose and perform elaborate chants that imitate the structure and content of blues songs. Yves’s “testament” recounts, in a beautifully manipulated voice whose semi-formal cadences have a faintly antique ring, his serendipitous “invention” of the harness, which instantly alters his own and his neighbors’ lives—changes quickened when a young American anthropology student, Ruth Blum, arrives, bonds rapidly with Yves’s family, stimulates further “Inventions” (such as the four-wheeled cart and the paving of roads), and falls in love with Yves’s chaste and contemplative brother Mandrik le Chouchou, himself a traveler who, like Marco Polo, had returned home with glorious tales about the prosperous cities of the Orient. The story of how Mandragora (another word for mandrake, the plant reputedly capable of inducing a soporific state) “progresses,” from primitivism through (rudimentary) mechanization to a sobered comprehension of (in Ruth’s words, about her own civilization) “what we’ve strayed from, what we once had and have since lost” is powerfully conveyed through a flexible narrative that’s a pitch-perfect imitation of first-person historical reconstruction, complete with (often very amusing) footnotes and comments from Yves’s “editor.” A commanding and extraordinarily accomplished debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22179-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party. The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising. But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party. Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.Pub Date: June 13, 1949
ISBN: 0452284236
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1949
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult...
A Boston-area waitress manages debt, grief, medical troubles, and romantic complications as she finishes her novel.
“There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write in the morning,” Casey explains at the opening of King’s (Euphoria, 2014, etc.) latest. The top three are her mother’s recent death, her crushing student loans, and the married poet she recently had a steaming-hot affair with at a writer’s colony. But having seen all but one of her writer friends give up on the dream, 31-year-old Casey is determined to stick it out. After those morning hours at her desk in her teensy garage apartment, she rides her banana bike to work at a restaurant in Harvard Square—a setting the author evokes in delicious detail, recalling Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, though with a lighter touch. Casey has no sooner resolved to forget the infidel poet than a few more writers show up on her romantic radar. She rejects a guy at a party who reveals he’s only written 11 1/2 pages in three years—“That kind of thing is contagious”—to find herself torn between a widowed novelist with two young sons and a guy with an irresistible broken tooth from the novelist's workshop. Casey was one of the top two golfers in the country when she was 14, and the mystery of why she gave up the sport altogether is entangled with the mystery of her estrangement from her father, the latter theme familiar from King’s earlier work. In fact, with its young protagonist, its love triangle, and its focus on literary ambition, this charmingly written coming-of-age story would be an impressive debut novel. But after the originality and impact of Euphoria, it might feel a bit slight.
Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult four-top.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4853-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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