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THE TOURNAMENT

Name: THE TOURNAMENT
Author: John Clarke
ISBN: 1-4013-0092-8

A NOVEL OF THE 20TH CENTURY

by John Clarke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2003

Who wins? Find out for yourself, and be dazzled along the way as, thanks to the indefatigable Clarke, you also brush up on...

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Australian Clarke’s first US publication is a genius-touched tour de farce that imagines the 20th-century’s intellectual giants competing in the biggest tennis tournament ever held.

The contest, in Paris, goes on for 36 days, one chapter per each, with amusements major and minor abounding from the start. Here are some arrivals, for example: “Buster Keaton was catapulted in from Belgium, Escher arrived through the departure lounge, Dali came by overnight post and Alice Toklas sent herself as an attachment. Einstein said he had come by tram. ‘But there is no tram to Paris,’ corrected George Plimpton . . . . ‘That might account for the time lapse,’ Einstein explained.” And so it goes, for 35 more days, in a wondrously comic tumult of personalities, anachronisms, jokes—and, of course, tennis. The sportswriter’s tone is just-right irreverent—as when “Bertie Russell” plays “the Spockster” (that’s the doctor), or James Joyce goes against “SuperTom” Eliot. Clarke’s one-liners can be sharp as SuperTom’s aces: “Not bad,” says Virginia Stephen-Woolf, “But it would be nice to get a boom of one’s own”; “I was lucky,” says Beckett; “ ‘Marlene [Dietrich] looked great today,’ said Pavlova. ‘I was lucky to get on top of her.’ ” All is not jocular, though. Paul Robeson leaves his country; Rosa Luxemburg is murdered; “Amelia Earhart is also missing”; “Bessie Smith never made it to the hospital”; and Anna Akhmatova “disappeared from the circuit.” Still, amid the century’s tragedies, humor persists, some of it biographic and scientific (“Wodehouse and Isherwood have departed for the US. Einstein left yesterday, last night and again this morning”), tons of it literary (“Eliot was now cautioned for banging his raquet on the ground and yelling ‘Jug, jug, jug, fucking juuuuuugggggg!”), with author Clarke even showing his own stuff in some wonderfully sensitive parodies of the styles of the greats.

Who wins? Find out for yourself, and be dazzled along the way as, thanks to the indefatigable Clarke, you also brush up on last century’s intellectual history.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2003

ISBN: 1-4013-0092-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ATMOSPHERE
by John Clarke

- BOOK REVIEW
Middle Waters
by John Clarke

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LONESOME DOVE

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.