In a setting as menacing as any bad dream, Palestinian writer Nasrallah explores the nature of personal identity in a remote desert village. When five men arrive in the middle of the night to announce that, like all the teachers in the area, he'll have to pay for his burial expenses and being dead did not exempt him, the narrator is naturally startled. When he protests that he's not dead yet, that his heart is still beating, and when the visitors reply with one voice, ``That's no proof you're alive,'' he is even more alarmed. He notices then that the other bed in the room that he shares with a fellow teacher, who coincidentally (or not) also shares his name, is empty: His namesake has disappeared. This problem becomes more an existential dilemma of Who Am I? than a real search for a missing colleague. And as he tries to resolve it, the narrator, a schoolteacher sent on contract to this remote region of the Arabian peninsula, describes the villagers' narrow lives and their aversion to strangers. People disappear and the villagers don't seem to care—``...nobody asked about his absence. Was Ustadh Muhammad just a small insect who came and left without anyone noticing?'' It's a place where mosquitoes abound, wolves howl outside, and inside their stone rooms the villagers sit, ``lamps extinguished, realizing things would never change and that its parched wound would always lie open to the sky.'' It's a place where fevers of the body and the mind are rife. A flight into saving madness is perhaps inevitable in such a hellish place and situation. An accomplished first novel, almost poetic in its lyrically intense evocation of place, that limns skillfully the horrors of dissonance and disintegration in an unfamiliar setting.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56656-103-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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