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SOUL MOUNTAIN

It all eventually coheres into a vision of an inchoate, voracious culture from which any sentient soul might understandably...

Readers surprised by the recent news that obscure Chinese dissident expatriate Gao had won this year’s Nobel Prize may still be seeking enlightenment even after they’ve finished this imperturbably meditative and leisurely 1989 “novel”—his first fiction translated into English.

The few known facts about its author’s life are subsumed in its narrative: a first-person account by a writer and artist out of favor with Communist authorities, who is mistakenly diagnosed with terminal cancer and undertakes a journey throughout his country’s remote central and northern provinces, in hopes of escaping the burden of connections—personal and political alike—with both other people and institutions. The narrator imagines an alternative self (“You”) and a woman companion (“She”) “who” are in effect only pronominal projections of a single sensibility—as it encounters various representatives of Chinese society: miscellaneous villagers, rangers protecting government “preserves” and itinerant acrobats “enact[ing] . . . scenes of grossly unnatural human distortion,” hermitic Daoist priests and “Wild Men” prowling the forests, among many others. A semblance of plot appears in his wavering intimacy with “the woman,” whose dreams of a normal life among others contradict his hopeful drift toward absolute independence. Ironically enough, his peregrinations introduce him to people, stories, and natural phenomena (including the beckoning mountaintop) that trigger memories of his earlier life, and challenge his willed retreat from the quotidian (“I am still seduced by the human world,” he ruefully concludes, “I still haven’t lived enough”). It’s an arduous trek for the reader, redeemed by such vivid set pieces as a hair-raising visit to a “panda observation compound”; the tale of an elderly carpenter obliged to carve the likeness of a goddess who he knows will punish him for his sins; and a fascinating anecdotal account of the founding of the Ming Dynasty.

It all eventually coheres into a vision of an inchoate, voracious culture from which any sentient soul might understandably recoil. A dramatically promising situation; one wishes it had been framed in a story.

Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2000

ISBN: 0-06-621082-8

Page Count: 528

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000

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HOME FRONT

Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...

 The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.

The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart. 

Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012

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'SALEM'S LOT

A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975

ISBN: 0385007515

Page Count: 458

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975

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