A debut novel from the American co-founder of Granta that, appropriating its title from the work by the great Talmudic scholar Maimonides, provides an ingenious if metaphorical twist to the events of 1492. When a strike delays their flight out of Mariposa, Spain, two women—Holland, an English filmmaker; and Hanni, an aging American searching for her family's treasured ``Letters from Esau,'' as well as for a son she hasn't seen since his birth in war-torn Berlin- -find they have the same travel agent, Ben. Ben is the author of a travel book called A Guide for the Perplexed, which offers ``no itineraries, no routes touristique'' but only help for those who no longer know where or how to go. In a series of set pieces, the narrative—interspersed with letters, historical lore, excerpts from the guide—moves back and forth from the 15th century to the present, from Inca kingdoms to Berlin, as the women while away the wait for the delayed flight. They wander from a bordello bar to an adult-movie house, from the home of the mysterious violinist Sandor to the richly symbolic Cave of Esau. On these wanderings, lugging a mysterious trunk Ben has entrusted to Hanni, the two women meet a host of characters, including Holland's long-lost daughter Isabella; a Peruvian descendant of Maimonides; and a British rock band. Connections and coincidences multiply as life histories are told, and family legends of famous Jewish ancestors are recalled. In a climatic scene in the Cave of Esau, from which Esau had sailed with Columbus to found a Jewish nation in the Americas, all is made clear. Destinies are linked, and the real purpose of the centuries of wanderings by Hanni's ancestors is revealed: ``Esau said it best—we are all Jews. Our survival is in our motion.'' Conceptually quite brilliant—but with too many tricks, too many mirrors, and too little really at the center of it. Promising but flawed.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40893-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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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