Sure to ignite controversy among Jamesians.
London-born author Jones’ novel explores the troubled relationship of an American expatriate novelist and his cousin, a charming orphan infected with tuberculosis.
A fictional character based on Minny Temple, impoverished cousin of Henry James and model for many of his female protagonists, Emily Hudson is orphaned at 16 when her family succumbs to consumption. Forced back on the tender mercies of her uncle, straitlaced Boston theologian William Cornford, she’s packed off to boarding school, but soon expelled, in 1861, for being too outspoken. Emily rejoins the Cornfords, who openly despise her, except for cousin William, a sickly, scholarly young man already making literary waves in Boston. After Emily scuttles her marriage prospects by rejecting dashing and wealthy Captain Lindsay, a Union officer, her uncle disowns her, but William asks her to accompany him to London, where, with his financial backing, she will be free to pursue her ambition to study painting. In London, William distances himself from Emily, except for weekly dinners at which he doles out her stipend. An aristocratic acquaintance, Caroline Trelawney, helps Emily negotiate a young lady’s entrée into London society—in some ways freer, in others more oppressive toward women than Boston’s. Narrowly escaping the clutches of attractive roué Lord Firle, Emily eventually exhausts William’s patience with her utter heedlessness. (Apparently, he’s unable to discard the puritanical social mores he aspired to escape in Europe.) Not only does Emily get Caroline to pose in deshabille, she runs out in a storm, triggering a tubercular attack, and embarrasses William by dressing down an anti-American dinner guest. Fleeing to Rome, Emily finally achieves autonomy as a woman and an artist. This partially epistolary novel (Emily corresponds with her school friend Augusta, Caroline and William’s dour but deep sister Mary, among others) renders Emily and her mostly harmless foibles believable, but William remains a cipher.
Sure to ignite controversy among Jamesians.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02180-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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