A well-crafted story hiding under its more esoteric elements.
Green’s debut novel is a peculiar meditation on the natures of art and creation, well-paced with a singular character at its center.
The oddness of Green’s tale is immediate and at first a little disorienting. “In the beginning there was nothing. Then there was me,” says narrator Tilman Burbeck. “I appeared fully formed and whining, six years old and probably sick.” In the first dozen pages, he reveals his father is a statue, his mother having been raped at the Berlin Museum of Fine Art by a sculpture of the artist Tilman Riemenschneider, and his blood is made of stone. It’s tough to get a bead on Burbeck and whether, now looking back on his life as a 70-year-old, he means the things he’s saying metaphorically or literally. That confusion lingers, but it soon becomes part of the book’s charm as it establishes the logic of its world. Burbeck left behind a family that doesn’t quite understand him to navigate his way through art school, make friends, fall in love and deal with his muse, which in quiet moments appears to him as a kind of demon: “I will find her again. My Muse said I will. It may be half demon and speak in half-truths, but my Muse doesn’t lie. I’ll just have to be patient.” The first woman he devoted himself to was Lila Thornton, whom he met on a trip to Europe searching for his father. In his latter days, he says he is happily married to a different woman, tipping the fact that his relationship with Thornton, which spans the bulk of the book, ended at some point. Burbeck is torn between his devotion to his art and to other people, which leads to long passages of philosophical musing that threaten to kill momentum but don’t. This is a novel of search and discovery, the kind of thing that could easily be fatally precious. Yet Green’s characters are compelling, and the plot marches along subtly.
A well-crafted story hiding under its more esoteric elements.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941877012
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Big Buddy Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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