An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry,...
If you’ve ever wondered what ingredients to use to create a zombie out of a living person (and how exactly does one extract the bones of a garter snake’s middle ear?), your search ends with this one-of-a-kind novel.
“I died on the night of the most beautiful day of my life.” So begins the testimony of Hadriana Siloé, a sensuous pale-skinned Creole woman who, on the Saturday evening of Jan. 29, 1938, in her Haitian village of Jacmel, collapses at her wedding altar. She had earlier taken a mysterious potion that induces what we would now label “living death.” She is buried in the midst of a village bacchanal and later revived by an evil sorcerer. Keep in mind, however, that two-thirds of the book passes before Hadriana gives us her side of the story. Before then, this ribald, free-wheeling magical-realist novel, first published in 1988 and newly, engagingly translated by Glover, examines this traumatic event from many different angles, drawn from before and after Hadriana’s…um...passage. There is, for example, the legend of a libidinous young Jacmel citizen transformed into a libidinous butterfly enjoying carnal knowledge of most of the women in town; a town that undergoes precipitous decline tied to Hadriana’s misfortune. These and other aspects of the novel’s central catastrophe are filtered through the recollections and research of a man named Patrick, whose youthful ardor for Hadriana endures throughout the decades of her afterlife. Patrick, who seems a surrogate for the now-90-year-old Depestre, shows himself throughout to be a true savant on all things zombie, from the aforementioned recipe for “zombie poison” and its antidote to the celebrated cases of “Lil’ Joseph [the] zombifier” and the dead-woman-walking known as “Gisèle K.” By the time you’ve wandered these spooky, sultry corridors of Haiti’s collective subconscious, you’re persuaded that the true sorcery being practiced here is that of a mature artist coming to terms—and making peace—with “the natural, the comical, the playful, the sensual, and the magical aspects of Jacmel’s painful past.”
An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry, folk art, and véritable l’amour.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61775-533-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
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
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