An impressive denouement to Marx’s unfinished play.
Majkut (Asterion, 2014, etc.) offers a fresh take on the classic revenge tale inspired by the early writing of Karl Marx.
Only partially completed in 1837, Marx’s verse-drama fragment Oulanem: A Tragedy comprises four scenes and seven characters. Majkut’s slow-burning conspiracy adds to that cast, builds on the scenes and imagines their trajectories, relocating the action from Italy to 19th-century Austria following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Nihilistic philosopher Tillo Oulanem (who sees the world as “a detestable, viscous place populated by slugs”) has accepted an invitation to lecture at Innsbruck’s university. His arrival is heralded by Rudolf Pertini, a seemingly docile civil magistrate who offers lodging to Oulanem and his companion. But Pertini’s charitable demeanor belies his true intentions: He’s been waiting for years to exact revenge on Oulanem. By casting others of Innsbruck as pawns in his scheme, Pertini instigates Oulanem’s undoing. “Now, I set the minor characters in motion,” he says, “and, like grindstones in a mill, they will prepare the flour for my feast…I will set the table, prepare the final banquet, and serve only one guest, who will consume himself.” The pawns provide mostly engrossing story arcs of their own. There’s Albirich, a smug Viennese student of high standing who organizes trysts in an abandoned clock shop; Beatrice, a young woman whose menstruations lead to violent mood swings and, consequently, a laudanum addiction; Oulanem’s protégé, Lucindo, orphaned as a boy and determined to uncover his origins while he fights Albirich for Beatrice’s affections; and Benedikt Perto, a well-meaning (if hypocritical) priest and staunch combatant of apothecary methods of healing. These braided storylines produce an image of an insular town consumed by anti-Semitism, infidelity, political tension and superstition. While casual readers may feel bludgeoned by the heaps of Austrian history, most anyone interested in the political and social minutiae of everyday people will find these details enriching. In a novel written so well, and with such restraint, it’s easy not to feel Pertini’s steadily tightening noose until it closes as all is revealed—to great satisfaction—in the final act.
An impressive denouement to Marx’s unfinished play.Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615959931
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Nyx Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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