A dark winter of the spirit in a South African setting—and limned in sometimes too exquisite prose—by the author of Another Country (1992). Though his novel's set against a background suggestive of the oppressions of the recent past, Schoeman, an Afrikaner living abroad, is more concerned with the universal implications of violence, the role of creativity ``under siege,'' and the destruction of long-held ethnic shibboleths. Protagonist Adriaan, an acclaimed Afrikaner poet, lives in Cape Town, but the city's familiar landmarks are incidental, for what is happening to Adriaan and the city is reminiscent of places like Sarajevo—places where, as a fellow poet observes, ``There was a community, there was something happening here, something was alive—that's all gone now.'' Now in this city, in this ``burnt-out country,'' barbed wire closes off roads, and blood stains the asphalt. Over a dreary rainy winter, Adriaan, who is also mourning the departure of his lover Stephan, finds he cannot write. His job at a small museum cataloging donations seems futile; the local literati's posturing even more desperate; and the country's future bleak. Old friends flee to Europe, abandoning beloved homes in the countryside because there's no point going on, while others realize that they've been duped by the authorities, by Afrikaner mythology. Referring to a visit into the countryside, a journalist friend admits that, like a foreigner, he can now look cleareyed at what is happening: at the pervasive violence and poverty. As the winter ends, Adriaan, reconciled to solitude, has taken leave, as it were, of the place, and begins to write again, acknowledging ``that love remains, and memories, but that could never be enough. One did one's work.'' Life, creativity will endure. Palpably dark and apocalyptic evocations of GîtterdÑmmerung and creative despair, though the themes are long in the working, and never quite live up to their implied promise.
Pub Date: June 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-85619-200-8
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Sinclair-Stevenson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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