A philosophical novel that takes an innovative approach but which might have benefited from fewer storylines.
Snow (Assassins, 2007, etc.) and de la Croix weave philosophy, romance, and mystery into three separate but intertwined narratives to create a high-stakes scholastic adventure.
The academic world is shaken up by the discovery of a one-of-a-kind, previously unknown manuscript of a new Platonic dialogue: The Erotic. The find fits perfectly into doctoral candidate Dora von Neuback’s thesis, but the book is stolen before it can be properly released to the world. Dora’s adviser, the dashing, self-assured philosophy/history professor Philip Platner, sends her to southern France to meet with a female colleague and locate the dialogue. Although Snow and de la Croix aim for passion, the budding relationship between adviser and advisee comes across as excessively theatrical and reminiscent of a bad romance novel. Things get worse when both Dora and her colleague become entangled with gypsies and a secret organization and then get kidnapped, relegating the otherwise strong female characters to being damsels in distress. Platner and a male friend rush off to save the women and Plato’s book. The second storyline, set in 14th-century Europe, tells the star-crossed love story of a knight and a countess’s daughter; however, it remains unclear until the very end why this narrative is included. The third plotline transports readers back to ancient Greece, centering on Plato and other great thinkers in the previously unknown dialogue. For historical accuracy, the authors helpfully include footnotes throughout, most prominently in the ancient Greece narrative. However, although the notes are informative, they can also be cumbersome, as they pull readers out of the story to explain minutiae. Each of the three narratives is bursting with ambitious numbers of characters and locations. However, they all have comprehensive but often confusing plots.
A philosophical novel that takes an innovative approach but which might have benefited from fewer storylines.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496979063
Page Count: 184
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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