A simple plot and sharply focused characters makes this a very satisfying tale.
In Aubert’s debut novella, the first installment in a series, a young man leaves home to escape familial expectations >and find adventure.
When the story starts, Shand has already departed from his village, lured by the promise of treasures along a shore, which are said to be near a destroyed boat. He leaves his own prized vessel behind and finds a woman barely alive on dry land. He winds up having to kill her, and shortly thereafter, he finds himself being chased by a wily, violent little man that Shand calls a “native.” This situation becomes an amusing battle of will and wit, played out with no dialogue, save for some pained shouts and screams. The scene showcases a unique, engaging feature of Aubert’s prose throughout this tale: he’s able to tell a full story with very little conversation, but without relying on excessive exposition. Indeed, part of the appeal of this book is that it’s difficult to place it in a particular time or location. However, there are hint in the worldbuildings; for example, Shand’s village depends on fishing, and they don’t seem to know much about any villages that are more than a couple of day’s travel in any direction; it’s also revealed that Shand built one of the first plank boats in his primitive village, using bronze and nails. The author also provides vivid descriptions of the rivers and forests that Shand traverses, and his protagonist meets a diverse variety of people in his adventure. Indeed, his home village is populated with many colorful characters, including his cranky but perhaps more practical uncle, Royce, and a lot of people who think that Shand is a little snooty for trying to build a plank boat so large. In places, Aubert’s book almost seems like a Lake Wobegon tale set in some ancient, undefinable time and place. As a result, readers will look forward to future stories by the author.
A simple plot and sharply focused characters makes this a very satisfying tale.Pub Date: March 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5302-0070-2
Page Count: 130
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2017
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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