Emphasizing the teller rather than the tales, the author weaves an intricate narrative of aesthetics and sexual politics.
Brazilian novelist Piñon (Caetana’s Sweet Song, 1992, etc.) forcefully brings out the erotic element in Scheherazade’s difficult and delicate situation as she spins the stories of One Thousand and One Nights to the Caliph of Baghdad.
The Caliph, it seems, found his wife in flagrante delicto with a slave and had her executed. Then he began to serially bed young women and have them killed immediately thereafter. Scheherazade, younger daughter of the Vizier, sets herself the task of breaking the chain of evil the Caliph has started. As we all know, her plan involves spinning out tales that catch his jaded imagination, tales so cunning and creative that he’ll keep her alive for another night, and another, and yet another. Of necessity Scheherazade “perfects the art of overlapping stories” and becomes “master of meager time.” Part of the price she pays, however, is the sex she must have every night with the Caliph, joyless couplings that disclose the state of his ennui. Joining Scheherazade at the Caliph’s palace, and at times colluding with her, are her older sister Dinazarda, whose emotions exist somewhere in the zone between envy and resentment, and their slave Jasmine, who intrigues to rise in the hierarchy of kitchen and stables. Both women discreetly withdraw when the nocturnal moment of sexual reckoning arrives. Ultimately, of course, Scheherazade becomes an allegory of the artist, spinning webs of words to capture the imagination. Toward the end of her storytelling tenure, Scheherazade grows weary and orchestrates a substitute bedmate for the Caliph, the first step on her road to freedom, though she has to find a substitute for her narrative art as well. Along the way she wonders whether it might not be preferable for the Caliph, “as a personal favor, to decree her death as a way to free herself from her destitute life.”
Emphasizing the teller rather than the tales, the author weaves an intricate narrative of aesthetics and sexual politics.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26667-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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