A subtly handled story of a saint’s life that offers some useful insights into both the era and the woman.
Loranger’s (The Odyssey of Art O’Hara, 2012) historical novel tells the tale of Mary, an Egyptian prostitute during the late Roman Empire who repents and becomes a Christian saint.
As a youth, Mary often dreams of a man named Charaxus, who her mother says is imaginary but whom her father describes as her guardian angel. Charaxus convinces Mary to leave home when she’s 12; she goes to Alexandria, where she’s soon working for a madam, Lady Danae. Seventeen years later, Mary is living with a rich man named Nobilius as his personal prostitute. He asks her to marry him but she declines; after the second rebuff, he commits suicide by hurling himself off the famous lighthouse at Pharos. Mary then joins a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, paying for her sea passage by providing her services to members of the crew. Onboard, she meets a man who looks like Charaxus, and they become lovers. In Jerusalem, Mary tries to enter the Great Church, which purportedly sits atop Jesus’ burial place, but some unseen force keeps her from going in. Then she hears the songs of an elderly flautist and finds that she can finally enter. She decides to devote her life to Jesus and crosses the Jordan River to live in the wilderness as a hermit. Charaxus shows up in her cave and argues against her religion, but Mary resists him. Years later, Mary meets a monk named Zosimus and tells him her story. Overall, this is a tightly written account of the life of an obscure saint, and it spins a credible yarn of what life might have been like in her time and place. Although the book contains many sexual interludes, they are rather chaste—perhaps too chaste for modern readers. Some lyrical passages hint at the beauty of the Bible, as when the flautist declares that “all mankind is grass.” But Mary’s motivations aren’t always entirely clear—especially those that led her to her ultimate conversion. She talks of doing “penance” for the “joys of sex,” but some readers may wonder whether Mary has truly changed her ways because of a deep religious revelation.
A subtly handled story of a saint’s life that offers some useful insights into both the era and the woman.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-8940-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
