A sometimes cryptic, often moving meditation on life, death, and eternity.
A monk dictates enigmatic writings that speak of a looping cycle of rebirth in High’s fable-like novel.
In an island monastery in a nameless land, a one-eyed monk known as the Temple Sweeper tells another monk, called Enduring Sound, about his past in fragmented soliloquies, stories and poems. They coalesce into a narrative about a war fought during the Temple Sweeper’s boyhood in which his family is massacred; the conflict escalates into a campaign to exterminate orphans, known as the Lost Children. The future Temple Sweeper roams the war-torn landscape encountering mythic personalities, including a mute girl who keeps a diary and helps him rescue an infant boy; the shaman Hempis, who can fly and manipulate others’ dreams; and a circus and theater group run by the Ghostwoman, who ferries him and the infant boy to the monastery. Along the way the Temple Sweeper kills soldiers—and cuts off some of his fingers in penance—and becomes a Dream Master capable of assassinating people in their sleep. In later sections of the novel, the aged Temple Sweeper becomes a ghost while still communing with Enduring Sound; new characters arrive with cosmic ties to old ones. The author, a poet and Zen monk, touches on violent and supernatural elements, but the book is less an adventure yarn than a fairy-tale philosophical reflection on Buddhist themes of compassion, forgiveness, reincarnation, and the oneness of being and non-being (“If things arise and fall away at the same time, they don’t actually exist, the jade-shadowed crow observes— / And if they don’t actually exist, how can they cease to exist? the amber crow caws back”). These pensées can be heavy going, but the vivid lyricism of High’s writing (Enduring Sound describes the Temple Sweeper “shivering like a hungry ghost with only the dimmed widow-light of the sky revealing his torn face and shuttered eye”) makes for an engrossing read. Photos of the author’s colorful, swirling ensō paintings provide a captivating visual accompaniment to the text.
A sometimes cryptic, often moving meditation on life, death, and eternity.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798985620641
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Wet Cement Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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