A robust, captivating account of the life of Jesus in Roman-occupied Palestine.
Lamensdorf (The Mexican Gardener, 2013, etc.) imagines the life of Jesus in this revisionist historical novel.
There have been so many takes on the life of Jesus that even those books that seek to be controversial are hard-pressed to come up with new angles. The Jesus of Lamensdorf’s novel is not the figure from Christian Sunday schools. His ministry was inspired in part by the murder of his wife and children—and yet he falls well within the recognizable parameters of a historical Jesus figure. Lamensdorf places Jesus (or Joshua, as he is called by his fellow Jews) at the center of a political struggle in which the Roman occupation of the Jews’ homeland has created a situation of antagonism, violence, and rebellion. Young Joshua is of humble origins, and through his character, the author attempts to demonstrate how a love of God and people can brush up against the deadly threshing machine of an empire. From the stony hills of Galilee to the teeming streets of Jerusalem, the novel explores just what it means to be a Messiah, a miracle worker, and to save humanity from its own sins. “He knew they loved him, these people of Israel,” the author writes of Joshua, “and he loved them, too, every one of them. And he would save them, of that he was certain.” Lamensdorf is a talented writer, and the ambitiously detailed Galilee of the novel is highly immersive. The book’s heavily researched milieu possesses the heft of authority that fans of historical fiction crave. An unnecessary framing narrative set in modern times delays the real story, but once the reader gets to Nazareth in 5 B.C.E., the plot begins to gallop. The author is more interested in providing the political context for Jesus’ movement—where Romans are the clear villains—than he is in changing religious opinions. There are many books about Jesus, but this one is more compelling than most.
A robust, captivating account of the life of Jesus in Roman-occupied Palestine.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9852381-0-0
Page Count: 718
Publisher: SeaScape Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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