Poet and novelist Sobin (Venus Blue, 1992) offers up a strange and serious love-tale imbued by the surreal—with results hardly less compelling for that. Professor (at the University of Avignon) of the rapidly dying Provenáal language, the methodical Cabassac finds his life changed from the day he takes home with him the beautiful Julieta, whom he first notices as she sits alone in the back row of his lecture auditorium. Julieta shares Cabassac’s passion for capturing the last oral records of Provenáal, and the pair—now living together, though at first sexlessly, in Cabassac’s ancient and enormous farmhouse—make weekend trips to remote areas of Haute Provenáe, speaking there with old men and women in order to capture what Cabassac calls “breath relics” of the dying language. One weekend, by a waterfall, they do make love, and from then on all is changed—first by Julieta’s pregnancy, and then, before she delivers, by her death. Exactly how the crushed Cabassac will cope with his now-emptied life had best be left for readers to discover, though it does need to be said that only after making meals of the deeply buried, mysterious, and curiously atavistic truffles that he searches for on the ancient acres of his estate—only then is he able to dream of Julieta in ways even more rewardingly vivid than life. His contemporary life, indeed, is gradually left behind as Cabassac searches for his truffles, neglects his teaching, sells off bits of his estate (and then, disastrously, the whole thing), goes without electricity, then telephone, as he descends more and more deeply’symbolically? really?—into the lost antiquity that it seems now Julieta (an orphan) might herself in fact have arisen from. Not for literalists, but a symbolic-emotional tale that immerses the reader into the very air, feel, and texture of ancient Provenáe—and as a bonus serves up a fascinating handbook on the life and harvesting of the enigmatic truffle.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-04832-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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