A sure-handed narrative led by a hapless but resilient adventurer.
High jinks ensue in this picaresque novel when an author sets out ’round the world to shepherd his short story through several translations.
Novelist Story introduces readers to middle-aged Charles Abel Baker, who, like Story, is a writer and former professor of Russian history. Bored and stuck in his life, Charles desperately needs a project, an adventure. He decides to take a short story and have it translated through 10 different languages, then back into English to see whether at the end, à la a game of Telephone, it is even remotely like the original. He tries to interest high-powered publisher Derek Wainscot in the project and is rebuffed. But then Wainscot steals the idea himself, and that means deploying shady operatives to follow Charles and frustrate his plans whenever possible. But an old friend of Charles’, Jonathan Belknap, a retired CIA agent, smells a rat and deploys his own crew against Wainscot’s. The result is a merry, yearlong chase around the globe. Early on, Charles meets Svetlana Novgorodtseva, and love blossoms, fades, blossoms again. An unlikely adventurer, Charles gets out of one impossibly tight spot after another, sometimes by his own devices, sometimes thanks to Belknap’s long arm. There is more, much more, and it moves fast. Story is impressively inventive, and though this yarn is a zany one sure to induce a few grins, it’s not quite a gut-busting affair, especially when, for instance, a drug lord makes a point by executing a young kid in front of Charles. That hardly rates a guffaw. Still, the amusing spy-vs.-spy business involves old hands with handles like “Pig” and “Smilin’ Jack,” and Story is adept at the quick surprise and the odd plot twist. Short and punchy chapters feature background rumination about the beauty of words and the mysteries of translations.
A sure-handed narrative led by a hapless but resilient adventurer.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0986238208
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Blue Mile Books
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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