by Matthew L. Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2005
Hollywood can’t touch the ravishing horror portrayed here. (But should they decide to try, let’s hope they consult Hunter...
A brilliant retelling of this timeless classic about the insatiability of human desire.
First-time author Hunter takes the great tragedy of Medea, immortalized by Euripides, and presents it within the context of the heroic history of Jason. What results is a grippingly sympathetic narrative of these two famous figures and their often-frivolous but always daring actions. Classics lovers will recall Medea as one of the more frightening characters in Greek mythology, whose jealousy moves her to burn a rival alive and murder her own children. Hunter presents her as something more: a brilliant and powerful woman, whose cunning and resolve enable her to brutally subdue any foe, but whose romantic inexperience renders her vulnerable to Jason’s desire. Medea commits unspeakable atrocities on Jason’s behalf, and Jason thanks her with abandonment. Hunter hauntingly renders the human side of the monstrous Medea, and casts Jason as somewhat less than heroic. As the tale unfolds, reader sympathies will lie with Jason, who–sent off by his evil uncle Pelias to fetch (but hopefully never return with) the Golden Fleece–ably leads a boatful of Greece’s greatest heroes, Herakles and Orpheus among them. Many readers won’t be able to help envisioning the campy ‘60s film when considering the adventures of Jason, but these Argonauts quickly reveal their savage natures by hacking up the men of Lemnos, then exploiting their widows while awaiting favorable seas. From the moment Jason meets Medea, it’s clear that he will need her power to win the Fleece and will stop at nothing to attain it. Throughout, Hunter’s prose is lyric and probing and the action never flags.
Hollywood can’t touch the ravishing horror portrayed here. (But should they decide to try, let’s hope they consult Hunter first.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-34321-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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