An experimental work that will leave many erotica fans baffled.
A man explores psychedelic worlds with a sensual ghost for a guide in this erotic novel.
Jim, a human being, and Linsa, a spirit, have good conversations, but they do most of their communication through copious amounts of sex. When another apparent spirit, Prince Jod, appears one day, Linsa spends the weekend with him, and he and his spirit girlfriend, Riane, show her the time of her sexual life. When Jim asks to meet the newcomers, Linsa agrees, and soon Jim is having tantric sex with Riane, who reveals that Jod is actually a demon and that she’s Jod’s slave. Apparently, Jod is living in Jim’s “Third Chakra”; Linsa and Jim take a trip there, and it’s revealed to be a trippy, sex-filled Oz, complete with “munchkins.” Their mission is to prove to Jod that Jim is actually King Richard the Lion Heart, but that may be trickier than it seems. From Oz, they continue traveling in the various worlds of Jim’s chakras, experiencing everything from hallucinogenic drugs to the Wild West to even more sex. Every new spirit and erotic escapade is meant to lead Jim to the truth that he needs in order to unite with Linsa forever. Absurdity is the name of the game in this meandering tale that’s full of kooky characters and made-up worlds. The novel is largely written as quotation-mark–free dialogue, with some stage directions in parentheses thrown in. The best humor comes when characters, including the Sheriff of Nottingham, speak in a parody of Old English. But ultimately, this novel is just a vehicle for sex scenes, described every which way and involving every imaginable orifice. The erotic incidents range from the predictable to the instructional (one involves “Just the wrist now,” for example), but they’ll exhaust readers before Jim’s journey even begins.
An experimental work that will leave many erotica fans baffled.Pub Date: May 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9538-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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