Definitely not hammock reading. This is exhilarating, mind-bending stuff by an author who probes ever deeper into the...
The riddle of creation, and the innumerable natural and man-made shocks the overweening intellect is (so to speak) heir to, are the dominant concerns in this elusive and fascinating metaphysical fiction.
It begins teasingly, with a research scientist’s speculations about the accounts of the creation given in Genesis and other ancient texts, and how these relate to the “story” “told” by the “language” of DNA, as theoretically deciphered by James Watson’s theory of the double helix. Then, in another of the 12 “documents” that make up Mulisch’s text, we learn the story of Rabbi Jehudhah Löw of 16th-century Prague, whose efforts to fashion a golem out of clay (at the behest of his Emperor), and thus ensure the protection of the Jews from persecution, instead produces a homicidal Frankensteinian monster. Thereafter, the novel settles into the extended “confession” of Victor Werker, a microbiologist who’s part of an international team doing DNA research on Egyptian mummies, the hubristic inventor of what he terms the “eobiont” (“the simplest independent life form possible,” which Werker has assembled, in godlike fashion, from inorganic materials), and the bereaved father of a stillborn daughter (mocking proof of his inability to create life after all) to whom he addresses long, analytical letters sent to his estranged wife. All this sounds oppressively dense, but Dutch author Mulisch (The Discovery of Heaven, 1996) uses the complex, self-challenging (and strangely endearing) figure of Werker as the fulcrum of a dazzlingly brilliant fictional structure that is itself a series of “creations”: the original one recorded in the Bible, the construction of an artificial human, the making (that is, the conception, birth, and early years) of Werker himself, and finally his own experiences as a maker—of the aforementioned eobiont, and of the book in which his theories and their consequences are encapsulated and (to a surprisingly successful degree) explained.
Definitely not hammock reading. This is exhilarating, mind-bending stuff by an author who probes ever deeper into the mysteries that matter most—and keeps getting better.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-91024-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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