Barnes's famously light touch is applied to a bar of lead here: the nauseated, exhausted atmosphere of a newly de-Socialized Balkan state. The forever and glorious dictator, Stoyo Petkanov, is under arrest and about to face televised trial, prosecuted by law-professor-turned-prosecutor-general Peter Solinsky. With all his East European peers likewise deposed, Petkanov decides on a tactic of defiance—and with considerable skill Barnes fashions the old monster into the most compelling character: strength does not necessarily dissipate when power moves on. Pen-and-ink portraiture of other parts of the society—students, apparatchiks, ambitious functionaries clumsily changing their spots—are sprinkled throughout here, but the book essentially is a conversation—pre-trial and during—between corrupt illusion and vain hope and the gradations in-between. Barnes (Talking it Over, 1991; etc) probably is the finest practitioner of a new hybrid form of journalism-fiction. His elegant intelligence skims and swoops and repeatedly scores; his sensibility is dry, well-aimed, and consciously European, rather than stuffily British. But to make a pattern out of classic literature or social mores, as Barnes has done before, is different from bearing down on the tragedies of ideas, as here, in this brazenly short book. He seems to be making a balsa-wood diorama out of the ruins of the century; the story approaches its moral climax only to have the dictator rise in his own defense and read off all the commendations and tributes he was paid by the "free-world's" leaders. Meaning, of course, that evil is because we "let" it. It's so mingy and fey a conclusion, so disproportionate to the subject, almost mocking, that a reader feels as if he's watched a TV-news segment, a "focus report" on Good and Evil. Little about much.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0099540142
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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