Cheeky homoerotic novel set in Melbourne that will appeal mainly to readers who delight in the joys of sodomy, by the author of Glove Puppet (1998), an Aussie novel about a 20-year-old porn star who for years has been sleeping with his gay stepfather. Drinnan’s tone has dimmed down from the torturedly golden rhetoric of Glove Puppet and has been given over to the setting itself. The novel takes place largely in turreted Juliette, a smashing Art Deco mansion with English leadlight windows and is set in the Poet’s Corner, where all the streets are named after dead English novelists and Romantic poets. Master of the manse is Doc, a Catholic doctor, who lives with Dixon Brearly, writer of a garden/lifestyle column for the Toorak Courier, and with a Vietnamese painter named D—ng. Doc is being blackmailed by Ricky Drouin, a junkie from hell. Meanwhile, deciding to hire a live-in cook and housekeeper, the trio takes on wide-eyed young Murray Fox (formerly Shane Hutton), who has just arrived in Melbourne, been raped, and may have AIDS. Next door to Juliette lives Claudette with her cat Missy: pussy’s bow, the novel’s title, is an Australian idiom that means something like “I’ve had it up to here”—the neck, that is, where a pussy’s bow is tied. The title is as well a play on Murray’s breaking his neck. The story turns on the disposal of the body of a gay basher who attacks D—ng and whom the three kill by misadventure, then have to bury, and then have to invent a cover story for when the dead kid’s pregnant girlfriend shows up looking for him. Meanwhile, Claudette has eyes for Murray. As before, one for the boys, although lighter in tone and far less grim.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25255-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird) pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion, and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose. Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over an extended — and interrupted — period (thirty years) during which Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her removed. Finally the girls grow up — and Monica, Rose, Eunice, Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes) separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death, marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is a central focus — who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1961
ISBN: 0061711292
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1961
This new blank verse translation of the first “Canticle” of Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece compares interestingly with some of the recent English versions by American poets, though it suffers particularly by comparison with Allen Mandelbaum’s graceful blank verse one. Its aim to provide “a clear, readable English version . . . that nevertheless retains some of the poetry of the original” is only imperfectly fulfilled, owing partly to moments of unimaginative informality (“In Germany, where people drink a lot”), though these are intermittently redeemed by simple sublimity (“Night now revealed to us the southern stars,/While bright Polaris dropped beneath the waves./It never rose again from ocean’s floor”). Translator Zappulla, an American Dante scholar and teacher, offers helpful historical and biographical information in an Introduction and exhaustive Notes following each of the poem’s 34 “Cantos.” Readers new to Dante may find his plainspoken version eminently satisfying; those who know the poem well may be disappointed by it.
Pub Date: April 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44280-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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