Ambitious and interesting. Cooper’s book has its merits, but read Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight...
Just ask Scheherazade: it’s a dangerous business being bard to a king.
Asanka the poet has had it easy: in good with the ruler, he’s parlayed a facility with language—Sanskrit in particular—into a career celebrating the splendors of Sri Lanka. He has some money tucked aside, along with a compliant and pliant mistress, and he gets to write pretty much what he wants to. All that comes crashing down in the first few pages of British writer Cooper’s debut novel when the old king has an exceedingly bad day at the hands of a usurper. Magha, the new king, has his good points, but there’s a bit of Joe Stalin to him, occasioning the need to put out some good press and burn the books that don’t quite deliver the message he’s after. But, not knowing a word of Sanskrit himself, how can Magha be sure Asanka is saying the things he wants to convey to his much-put-upon subjects? There’s the rub, and there’s the seed of some palace intrigues, and the old vexing question arises from it of how a minor, apparently amoral bureaucrat is to survive with something of his honor intact when doing the service of the master. Cooper strives for literary effect at times, while at others he is a bit too modern-chatty (“After all, at least a Prince has cushions to sit on and does no work, but still, I was so bored”). The result is a Life of Pi–ish mélange of mixed diction and sometimes-clumsy Orientalizing (“it surprised me that his voice was as smooth as coconut water”). To his credit, though, Cooper does a nice job of imaging medieval Sri Lanka and, by way of his narrator, imparts some welcome notes on Sanskrit poetics along the way: “It’s the emotion of a poem that swallows up all smaller, more delicate feelings, that stands alone and cannot be broken down.”
Ambitious and interesting. Cooper’s book has its merits, but read Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights for more assured storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-070-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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