A well-executed rumination on ancient and familiar characters.
Campalani imagines the inner monologues of Jesus Christ in this short prose collection.
Campalani’s Jesus desires only love from an early age, knowing, as he does, what his future has in store for him. As a child, he asks Mary whether he can sleep in her bed, where he can feel safe and warm; “No,” she replies, “you must get used to loneliness. You’ll die alone.” Though the title refers to three voices, the narrators of all three sections are Jesus Christ at different ages. “Jesus” covers his early years, with vignettes describing his parents, his teachers, and his apprehension about his destiny. “Christós” covers the major events of his ministry, including his baptism, his time in the desert, and the Last Supper. The brief “Jhavè” limns his death on the cross, which involves him imagining a mirror that reveals his own difficult identity. Intro and outro sections—“First Letter” and “Farewell Letter”—bookend the work, which totals 48 pages. Campalani’s treatment of her subject matter is both subdued and earnest. She doesn’t go for irony or revisionism, but neither does she rob her subject of relatable human emotion. The result is a work that approaches the tragedy and affection that its source text must have originally possessed before it became dulled by centuries of reiteration. While Campalani’s language (or perhaps it is Sage’s translation from the Italian) sometimes veers into the abstract or clichéd (“This is my baptism of fire….You will join the revolution”), there are many small, quiet moments that show Christ as an individual. In one early scene, the child Jesus comforts his widowed mother who, after being rejected by a man at a wedding, realizes she can no longer be a sexual being: “She put a hand on my head to caress my hair. In that moment, my mum died as a woman, and she became the Mother: the earth, the moon, humidity, the night breeze, its thickness everywhere, the soil, the womb, honey, milk, pomegranate trees.” They feel real, and it is startling.
A well-executed rumination on ancient and familiar characters.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5191-8833-5
Page Count: 54
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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