Chaos theory as erudite fiction: a bleak yet comic odyssey exploring and expiating human frailties. Read it slowly and savor...
Johan Thoms was born in 1894 with a remarkably large head, and by age 9 he had humiliated an irascible grandmaster in chess. When this brilliant boy left his Bosnian village for the University of Sarajevo, he made a mistake that may have precipitated World War I.
In Thornton’s debut novel, the "overeager, impatient, and optimistic" (and fictional) Thoms is inserted into history as the chauffeur who innocently pilots Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, to their assassination in 1914. A sparkling student, when he gets to college he makes friends and begins a love affair with Lorelei Ribeiro, whose husband had "found a watery grave with the Titanic the previous year." Then his schoolteacher father descends into a mad obsession with Pythagoras and the boy must find work. He becomes an occasional driver for Oskar Pitiorek, an Austrian general based in Sarajevo, and the die is cast. After Franz Ferdinand's death, a guilt-mad Thoms rescues Cicero, a dying orphan; wanders to Portugal’s Lands End; meets Hemingway, Orwell, and Dorothy Parker during the Spanish Civil War; anonymously writes successful novels about "The White Kilted Brigadier"; and eventually grows into "an exquisite old man" seeking a "wormhole in the space-time continuum." Thornton’s arcane references and wordplay dazzle—Thoms’ "slow foreplay with the books" of the Kama Sutra, for instance—and his voice has echoes of Gabriel García Márquez (sans magical realism).
Chaos theory as erudite fiction: a bleak yet comic odyssey exploring and expiating human frailties. Read it slowly and savor it.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755149-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: The Friday Project
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fascinating elaboration—and somewhat of a departure for Atwood (The Robber Bride, 1993, etc.)—of the life of Grace Marks, one of Canada's more infamous killers. As notorious as our own Lizzy Borden, Grace Marks was barely 16 when she and James McDermott were arrested in 1843 for the brutal murder of their employer Thomas Kinnear and his pregnant mistress/housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. The trial was a titillating sensation; McDermott was hanged, and Grace was given the dubious mercy of life imprisonment. Some felt her an innocent dupe, others thought her a cold-blooded murderer; the truth remains elusive. Atwood reimagines Grace's story, and with delicate skill all but replaces history with her chronicle of events. Anchoring the narrative is the arrival of Dr. Simon Jordan, who has come to investigate the sanity of Grace after some 16 years of incarceration. A convert to the new field of psychiatry, Jordan is hoping to help Grace recover her memory of the murders, which she claims no recollection of. He begins by asking for her life story. Grace tells him of her first commission as a laundry maid in a grand house, and of her dear friend Mary, dead at 16 from a botched abortion. On she goes until she calmly relates the events that led up to the murders, and her attempted escape with McDermott afterward. Hypnotism finally "restores" her memory (or is Grace misleading Jordan?), with results that are both shocking and ambiguous. Employing a variety of narratives—Grace's own, Dr. Jordan's, letters, newspaper accounts from the time, poems from the period, and the published confessions of the accused—a complex story is pieced together. The image of the patchwork quilt, used repeatedly in the novel, is a fitting metaphor for the multiplicity of truths that Grace exemplifies. Through characteristically elegant prose and a mix of narrative techniques, Atwood not only crafts an eerie, unsettling tale of murder and obsession, but also a stunning portrait of the lives of women in another time.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47571-3
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
