An ambitious first outing, but Schuyler has bitten off more than she can chew.
History scars hapless individuals in 19th-century France and Japan.
A big year, 1870. In Japan, the opening to the West has begun, Buddhist temples are being closed or destroyed, and Shintoism is being installed as the national religion, while in France the Prussian army is closing in on Paris. East and West are yoked uncomfortably together in alternating sections, their one tenuous connection being a painting. In a town near Tokyo, Hayashi exports his own pottery to Europe. His childhood ended when a fire wiped out his family (his father had been plotting against the feudal regime), and now he lives unhappily with his wife, Ayoshi, knowing nothing of her background, her passionate love for an Ainu (Untouchable), or her abortion, arranged by her father, just like her marriage. Ayoshi mopes, preserving the Ainu in her paintings, one of which will find its way to Paris. The couple’s household will be enlivened by the arrival of a monk. His monastery has been destroyed, and he will behave most unmonkishly, exchanging kisses with Ayoshi and, jealous already, ripping up an erotic painting. In Paris, we focus on Jorgen, a young Danish soldier fighting for the French to atone for impregnating and abandoning his Danish sweetheart. No, it doesn’t quite compute, but then nothing Jorgen does makes sense. He trips over his rifle and has to have his leg amputated: no more soldiering. He goes to work for a Parisian importer, where he steals Ayoshi’s painting. He falls for his employer’s sister, the goodhearted Natalia, but realizes he needs her only after encouraging her to enlist. He recognizes the talismanic power of the painting (the universal language of art) but sells it anyway, then desperately tries to buy it back. In a go-for-broke ending, Schuyler sends him aloft in a balloon, while, in Japan, Ayoshi burns her paintings and ships out to San Francisco.
An ambitious first outing, but Schuyler has bitten off more than she can chew.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-441-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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