A Gorky Park-style thriller that's truly frightening—because it's set in today's Iran, which in Koenig's expert hands (Smuggler's Notch, 1988, etc.) unfolds as a modern-day Bedlam run by Muslim fanatics. There's no clue given as to whether Koenig visited Iran to research this story, but readers will feel as if they've gone there and escaped with their lives. Their guide to this sinister land and its amazements—like the box shaped like a pencil sharpener that's replaced swords for amputating thieves' fingers, or the seegah, ``temporary wives'' who marry for as little as an hour in a kind of sanctioned prostitution—is Darius Bahktiar. An American-educated prosecutor under the Shah, Darius years back killed a top dog of the Shah's secret police who'd gotten away with murder; thrown into dreaded Evin prison, Darius became a hero upon Khomeini's ascent and now is Teheran's homicide chief. But, with his Western ways, he's under constant suspicion by the Committee for the Revolution and its leader known as Bijan, who yanks Darius from the case that opens the story—the slaying of a woman involved in drug-running. Besieged at home as well—his ultrareligious wife wants a divorce- -but not to be blocked, Darius pursues the case—which turns up two more dead drug-runners—into a tangle of clues pointing to a group of female Muslim revolutionaries known as the Brides of Blood, and to the smuggling not just of heroin but of mycotoxins, agents of chemical warfare. When he begins to realize that Bijan wants the mycotoxins for Iran's arsenal, Darius is tossed back into prison and brutally tortured. A dramatic escape in which they pose as corpses allows Darius and his new love—a former Bride of Blood—to race for Turkey, mycotoxins in hand but with Bijan close behind. An absorbing mystery, incandescent action, and an Iran locked in nightmare: Salman Rushdie would love this novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1536-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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