Cameo appearances by Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dumas and Delacroix, and lush, period-appropriate, at times impenetrable...
Scenes from the lives of French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz and Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
Morgan’s latest (Indiscretion, 2006, etc.) is an impressionistic patchwork employing every narrative device from stream of consciousness to interior monologue, complete with an opera libretto and faux-Shakespearean blank verse. The protagonists’s alternating stories could be separate novels, so scant is their interaction—Hector and Harriet will not meet until the final third of the book. Hector’s sections take him from childhood to life in Paris, where, to the dismay of his physician father and pious provincial mother, he abandons medical studies to pursue his fanciful musical dreams. Harriet progresses from ingénue in her father’s theater company to music-hall melodrama in London, then takes roles in Shakespearean plays. Unable to dislodge Covent Garden’s venerable leading ladies, she heads for Paris, where, performing as Ophelia at the Odéon, she’s an overnight sensation. Her triumph is marred only by that eccentric young composer who pesters her with pleading missives, all of which she rebuffs. Years later, back in Paris for an ill-starred comeback, Harriet hears Hector’s Symphonie Fantastique, inspired by her. The twain meet and the attraction is finally mutual. Hector’s family disowns him for marrying an actress. Nevertheless, all is bliss—there’s a child, Louis, and an impoverished but loving ménage in Montmartre. Abruptly, even for a novel as circuitous as this, Harriet turns to partaking liberally of the brandy hidden in her bureau. Her irrational frenzies and tantrums tax Hector and drive him to Germany, where he’s well received by more musically astute audiences. Harriet’s dire prophecies of Hector’s betrayal are fulfilled: Hector falls prey to the shrewd, refreshingly ungifted Marie. Harriet is sent to the country to dry out. After several strokes, she becomes an inarticulate and hence more accommodating basket case, and Hector nurses her in her decline.
Cameo appearances by Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dumas and Delacroix, and lush, period-appropriate, at times impenetrable prose make for an unwieldy but credible behind-the-music exposé of the Romantic era.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36951-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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