A wandering narrative causes this story to win a few battles, but not the war.
In Kuwahara’s debut, two rival clans fight for control of feudal Japan in a series of battles that ensnares multiple generations.
The samurai of the Taira family come to power in the 12th century after helping the emperor beat back a bloody uprising led by the Genji clan. But Taira ascendancy only inspires more violent disputes—barely three years after the first battle, the surviving members of the Genji family once more conspire to overthrow the ruling government. Though this effort fails, it sets in motion a decades-long conflict that slowly undermines the Taira family’s power and briefly leads to a divided country with two emperors, each propped up by one of the rival families. At her best, Kuwahara paints a surprisingly dark portrait of the samurai—they resort to sneak attacks at night, they steal from villagers to survive and they execute the families of their defeated foes in order to prevent future retaliation. For the most part, though, the novel reads like a dispassionate, disorganized history book. Countless characters come and go with little more detail than a name, while battle scenes stumble in clunky prose, stale dialogue and meandering digressions. A few memorable moments slice through the clamor of inconsequential skirmishes—a defeated soldier orders his own daughter killed before the enemy can destroy her, or the exiled samurai who vainly proclaims himself king of his empty island. Focusing on a few key battles and devoting more depth to character and plot development would not only have sharpened the narrative, but could have more clearly illustrated the full consequence of war, the perilous family business.
A wandering narrative causes this story to win a few battles, but not the war.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434986924
Page Count: 328
Publisher: RoseDog
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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