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