Fans of classic literature may appreciate this and will no doubt enjoy picking out their favorite tales told in verse, but a...
In this homage to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a diverse group of security guards in present-day Los Angeles compete in a storytelling contest in order to win time off from work.
The tale begins during the night shift at a hotel with the supervisor trying to determine who among the security guards should get the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. To choose the winner of the prized vacation, the group holds a storytelling contest, and the book’s narrator acts as judge. Most of the guards take their turn, giving their versions of classics from O’Henry, Poe, Gilman, Saki, Crane and others. The Brubury Tales follows in the footsteps of Chaucer and Boccaccio in that it borrows stories from previous authors, but the familiarity of the stories here detracts from the larger narrative. What is more appealing than the tales is the interplay among the guards themselves; unfortunately, this often takes a backseat to the stories. Because each guard tells an often impersonal story, there is little chance for the guards to deepen their personalities through the telling of their tales. What little is learned about the storytellers is gleaned through the narrator’s words or the few pages between yarns. Former security guard Mundo wrote the entire book in verse, and while the poetry is impressive, it doesn’t quite fit the setting—poetry doesn’t sound natural coming from a gaggle of security guards at a Holiday Inn in L.A. The Brubury Tales is an ambitious undertaking, one which is mostly successful as an exercise in literary imitation. However, if a reader wants to hear Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” he can do worse than reading the original.
Fans of classic literature may appreciate this and will no doubt enjoy picking out their favorite tales told in verse, but a replica will always pale in comparison to the original.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7414-5975-6
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Infinity
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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