Berriault’s biographer may unearth much of interest here, but the general reader will likely find Petrowski is thin stuff...
This odd little parable, announced as an “ecological fable,” was written (and charmingly illustrated) by the late Berriault (d. 1997), in the wake of the long-delayed acclaim that greeted her award-winning story collection, Women in Their Beds (1996).
It’s an arch morality tale, about a disenfranchised parrot who alights accidentally in a Manhattan opera house, stays and learns to mimic brilliantly the singers who enchant him, is (inexplicably) dubbed “Petrowski” and made an international star—then, during a South American tour, is lured back to the tropical rainforest he now recognizes as his home, and becomes an enlightened ecologist. The story climaxes (if that’s the word) during a pilgrimage to the Himalayas, when a generic wise man confirms Petrowski’s tendency toward selfless sacrifice, and ends in a (conveniently planted) abandoned opera house right there in the Brazilian jungle, where “Petrowski and his Parrot Troupe” (of admiring avian colleagues) will thereafter make beautiful music, not for fame or fortune, but in celebration and defense of the unpolluted air where all may breathe (and singers may refine their artistry). If this isn’t a coy and rather precious allegory of Berriault’s own commitment to art and eventual triumph over obscurity (the summary observation, “An underestimated bird, he had overcome the odds against him and attained the pinnacle,” pretty clearly alludes to a neglected writer’s late-life success), then it’s a peculiarly underimagined children’s book. It has its moments; as always, Berriault’s genius shows itself in seemingly offhand yet precise and arresting details (a smitten Countess invites Petrowski to visit her “mansion surrounded by vast orchards of delectable fruits”). But it’s awfully fey and sentimental, and one doubts the author considered it ready for publication in its present state.
Berriault’s biographer may unearth much of interest here, but the general reader will likely find Petrowski is thin stuff performed in a decidedly minor key.Pub Date: June 30, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-074-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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