Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and...
New translations by veteran Celtic scholar Eickhoff (The Destruction of the Inn, 2001, etc.) of more than 30 early Irish tales and fragments.
Ancient Irish literature is an acquired taste, even for the Irish, and readers dipping into Eickhoff’s meticulously organized and annotated anthology may find themselves reminded on occasion of Frank McCourt’s recollections (in Angela’s Ashes) of little boys in Limerick combing through the folklore for descriptions of Cúchulainn winning his wife in a peeing contest. All of these tales date from well before the arrival of the English in the 12th century, and they portray a world of clans that is almost pre-agrarian and given heavily to the heroic arts of war and conquest. As the author puts it in his introduction, “Ancient Irish stories are categorized as Destructions, Cattle-raids, Courtships, Battles, Cave Stories, Voyages, Tragedies, Adventures, Banquets, Sieges, Plunderings, Elopements, Eruptions, Visions, Love Stories, Hastings, and Invasions.” Most of the selections here, in fact, are written renditions of much older bardic odes, and their content is usually aptly summarized by their titles (“The Battle of Etair,” “The Wooing of Luaine,” etc.). Like all heroic tales, they use a highly formal and ornate rhetoric (“A wrathful brown hero is there and a fair, splendid hero, and a valiant champion who could rival a king with thick, yellow-red hair that is like a honeycomb at the end of harvest”), but they also rely on comic antics and ribaldry (in “The Intoxication of the Ulster Men,” a tribe defends itself by having its women strip naked before the bashful Cúchulainn, knowing that he will turn his back on them) to a much greater degree than the Norse sagas. The “Fragments” collected at the end are a mixture of incomplete tales and miscellaneous proverbs (“Sufficiency is better than a multitude”).
Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and serious Celtophiles.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87019-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
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
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