An Oliver Sacks-ish New York shrink hangs out with an upbeat Man Who Fell to Earth in this banal debut. At the outset, an oddball patient calling himself ``prot'' and claiming to be a 357-year-old visitor from the planet K-PAX is delivered to the care of a psychiatrist named ``Gene Brewer.'' Prot, we learn, is a delusional amnesiac with a dual personality who has devised an elaborate fiction to compensate for a trauma suffered by the real person hidden beneath his cosmic obfuscations. K-PAX, as prot informs Gene during their sessions, is a mostly charmed world devoid of carnivores, aggression, and stress, where everyone subsists on fruit and grains, avoids sex (because it's painful), and talks to the animals. By exceeding the speed of light, K-PAXians can wander to other planets, which prot has done in order to help his human counterpart, Robert Porter, a catatonic former slaughterhouse worker laden with the weight of repressed memories. Unfortunately for Gene, prot is scheduled to ``depart'' only a few months after their regimen of therapy has begun, so the doctor must race against time to recover what he can of Robert's submerged biography from his protector and mouthpiece—that is, prot—before he disappears. With the help of hypnotism and a plucky newspaperwoman, Gene just might cure the spaceman and bring Robert back from catatonia. Meanwhile, prot offers commonsense remedies to his fellow zanies (an entertaining bunch) and to Gene's mildly dysfunctional family, employing a quasi-Christian, know-thyself riff that fans of Eliseo Subiela's similarly plotted film, Man Facing Southeast, will find most familiar. A genial psych lecture supplemented by a hefty dose of utopian blather. (Film rights to Universal)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11840-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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