A good adventure yarn, with plenty of historical atmosphere and local color.
A debut from Washington, D.C., attorney Punke describes the perilous adventures of a 19th-century frontiersman bent on revenge.
Hugh Glass apparently anticipated Horace Greeley’s advice about going west and growing up with the country, for that is precisely what he did. The son of a Philadelphia bricklayer, Glass became accustomed to living by his wits as a young man and during the War of 1812 made good money as a blockade-runner. Captured by Jean Lafitte’s pirates, however, he was faced with the choice of switching sides or walking the plank. He switched. Eventually he fell into the hands of the Spanish, who tossed him ashore south of Galveston and told him to turn north and keep walking. In Missouri, Glass joined an expedition of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and, in the novel, travels inland to trap and trade in what, 20 years after Lewis and Clark, is still largely uncharted territory. After being badly mauled by a grizzly bear, Hugh is left in the care of two comrades, John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger, who quickly decide that he’s a goner and not worth waiting for. They take his rifle and knife and abandon him to die alone. Miraculously, however, Glass not only survives but also manages to get back to St. Louis, even though he has to crawl much of the way. After he recuperates, his one thought is of revenge, and he sets out with all the tenacity of a good trapper to hunt down Fitzgerald and Bridger. Like any frontiersman, Hugh finds that he can’t hope to survive, much less succeed, without the help of the Indians, and he soon acquires a knowledge of their ways and lore. Eventually, his former betrayers find themselves face to face with a Revenant—a man come back from the dead.
A good adventure yarn, with plenty of historical atmosphere and local color.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1027-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
SEEN & HEARD
One can heartily recommend Bromfield’s translation to readers new to War and Peace, but for a fuller sense of Tolstoy’s...
If you’re a mountain climber, it’s still Everest. If you’re a baseball player, it’s the career home-run record. If you translate from the Russian, sooner or later you’ll visit the Colossus: Leo Tolstoy’s enormous masterpiece, whose composition absorbed a decade and whose godlike scope embraces “the intertwining of historical events with the private lives of two very different families of the Russian nobility.”
The words are those of Richard Pevear, who, with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky, has joined the intrepid army of translators including Victorian phenomenon Constance Garrett (who introduced War and Peace to the English-speaking world in 1904) and extending to her countryman Anthony Brigs, whose own new translation appeared to considerable acclaim in 2006.
The credentials Pevear and Volokhonsky bring to their task (lucid English-language versions of classic works of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov; a vibrant Anna Karenina in 2001) might well have discouraged rival translators. But not Andrew Bromfield, an accomplished scholar-critic perhaps the best known for translating the fiction of contemporary Russian malcontent author Victor Pelevin.
What’s new about Bromfield’s War and Peace? It reproduces the 1866 text: a leaner version of the novel, written before Tolstoy had conceived the discursive chapters of historical argument that would swell the later full text to nearly 1,500 pages. Interestingly this “first” version was made available to Russian readers only as recently as 2000.
Pevear and Volokhonsky give us the whole animal, and claim for translation the distinction of reproducing fully Tolstoy’s use of foreign languages (particularly French – considered more “elegant” by the aristocracy, even, one infers, after Napoleon was threatening to incinerate their homeland). Inevitably, their version seems ampler, more scrupulously descriptive and analytical. But there are other, subtler differences: for example, in the following account of a wolf hunt, which is a metaphor for the approaching death throes of the old landed aristocracy:
“The wolf was already at the edge of the wood, he paused in his run, turned his grey head awkwardly towards the dogs, in the way someone sick with angina turns his head and, with the same gentle rolling movement, leapt once, then again, and the last thing they saw was his tail disappearing into the wood.” (Bromfield)
“The wolf slowed his flight, turned his big-browed head towards the dogs awkwardly, as if suffering from angina, and, swaying just as softly, leaped once, twice, and, with a wag of his tail, disappeared into the bushes.”(Pevear and Volokhonsky)
One can heartily recommend Bromfield’s translation to readers new to War and Peace, but for a fuller sense of Tolstoy’s comprehensive and commanding artistic mastery, Pevear and Volokhonsky remain unchallenged as the A-team of Russian translators.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-079887-1
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
The versatile and accomplished McBride (Five Carat Soul, 2017, etc.) returns with a dark urban farce crowded with misjudged signals, crippling sorrows, and unexpected epiphanies.
It's September 1969, just after Apollo 11 and Woodstock. In a season of such events, it’s just as improbable that in front of 16 witnesses occupying the crowded plaza of a Brooklyn housing project one afternoon, a hobbling, dyspeptic, and boozy old church deacon named Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin should pull out a .45-caliber Luger pistol and shoot off an ear belonging to the neighborhood’s most dangerous drug dealer. The 19-year-old victim’s name is Deems Clemens, and Sportcoat had coached him to be “the best baseball player the projects had ever seen” before he became “a poison-selling murderous meathead.” Everybody in the project presumes that Sportcoat is now destined to violently join his late wife, Hettie, in the great beyond. But all kinds of seemingly disconnected people keep getting in destiny's way, whether it’s Sportcoat’s friend Pork Sausage or Potts, a world-weary but scrupulous White policeman who’s hoping to find Sportcoat fast enough to protect him from not only Deems’ vengeance, but the malevolent designs of neighborhood kingpin Butch Moon. All their destines are somehow intertwined with those of Thomas “The Elephant” Elefante, a powerful but lonely Mafia don who’s got one eye trained on the chaos set off by the shooting and another on a mysterious quest set in motion by a stranger from his crime-boss father’s past. There are also an assortment of salsa musicians, a gentle Nation of Islam convert named Soup, and even a tribe of voracious red ants that somehow immigrated to the neighborhood from Colombia and hung around for generations, all of which seems like too much stuff for any one book to handle. But as he's already shown in The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence.
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1672-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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