A best-selling Prix Goncourt winner and, like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Name of the Rose, one of those accessible contemporary European novels, more international than national in style and substance. Abandoned by his mother shortly after his birth in 1882 in Paris, young Gabriel Orsenna (the narrator and no relation to the author, though the epilogue hints at some association) is brought up by his father Louis and grandmother Marguerite. Both romantics and devotees of the French colonial empire, their idiosyncrasies alternately amuse and appall Gabriel, who, from childhood, is ``afflicted with a curious deafness to anything not concerning women'' and with a ``rubber vocation,'' which enables him to bounce along through his picaresque life like his beloved rubber ball. Terrified of tropical diseases, Louis turns down a position in the Colonial service, but young Gabriel briefly becomes a diplomat and is sent to London to teach the Brazilian embassy all about Auguste Comte. The visit is significant, for Gabriel not only learns more about his beloved rubber ball but also meets the two Knight sisters, Clara and Ann, who become the loves of his life. Gabriel, a roly-poly figure and possible inspiration for the Michelin man, goes on to work for a tire manufacturer. In the course of the book, Gabriel relates his unending adventures with the Knight sisters; his time in Paris under the Germans; his work—in rubber, naturally—for de Gaulle and the Free French; and his futile journey to Indochina in search of his father, believed to be selling bicycles to General Giap. Orsenna has not only created one of those memorable resilient characters who bounce along through life regardless, but has also written an astute and witty commentary on recent French history. A rich, if at times overstuffed, book with much to savor.
Pub Date: June 5, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-039103-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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