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HIS BROTHER

Name: HIS BROTHER
Author: Philippe Besson
ISBN: 0-434-01211-4

by Philippe Besson & translated by Frank Wynne ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2005

Besson’s prose has a fatalistic Greek gravitas and a stark honesty: a moving novel as memoir.

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French novelist Besson’s second outing (after In the Absence of Men, 2003) is the spare account of a beloved brother’s untimely death. It has the sensory impact of a memoir.

Lucidly translated, the story takes the form of nonchronological diary entries written over a time period of several months, from March, when the narrator’s younger brother, Thomas Andrieu, 26, undergoes a series of tests for “spontaneous haemorrhage,” until early September, when the young man will die of a mysterious blood disease (not AIDS). Over the spring and early summer, he is hospitalized and put through a series of ignominious procedures, such as a sternal tap involving “implements of torture,” infusions of immunoglobulin and corticosteroid treatment. He is released briefly but grows precipitously worse. The spleen is announced as the culprit, and a splenectomy performed—to no avail. Lucas, his older brother by a mere 15 months, watches Thomas suffer in silent agony, notes the friends falling away from him, including his flighty, green-eyed girlfriend Claire (Lucas’s lover, Vincent, deserts him as well). Clear-eyed and unflinching, Lucas records the visits of their ineffectual parents, whose own grief becomes selfish and crippling. As children, the brothers spent their summers on the Atlantic coastal island of Île de Ré, and Lucas’s narrative weaves in early memories of the two brothers, often taken as twins. Now, having accepted Thomas’s disease as incurable, the two return, in late summer, to Saint-Clément-des-Baleines to pass the last days of Thomas’s life. There, they regularly encounter an old man on the beach whose own life is “littered with corpses.” Thomas has a theory that his illness is a kind of reckoning, and the old man’s edict that “you don’t defy the will of the ocean” at last allows him to face his death.

Besson’s prose has a fatalistic Greek gravitas and a stark honesty: a moving novel as memoir.

Pub Date: July 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-434-01211-4

Page Count: 146

Publisher: William Heinemann/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LIE WITH ME
by Philippe Besson and translated by Molly Ringwald

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE ABSENCE OF MEN
by Philippe Besson & translated by Frank Wynne

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
HOME AND EXILE
by Chinua Achebe

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.