An intense, enjoyable piece for the erudite music lover.
An imaginative portrait of a schizophrenic man who believes he is Beethoven and the people charged with his care.
The Beethoven Years takes as its premise a passing comment the actor James Woods made to Newsweek magazine in 1986 and gets progressively more esoteric from there. Woods interviewed a homeless man suffering from schizophrenia while preparing for a film, and the man related to him a past in which he thought he was the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Shearer uses this as the seed for his book, envisioning this man who went by the moniker “Ludi Vann” and deliberately ruined his ear drums to become deaf. At its height, his illness is a sweeping, maniacal force polluting his entire life. God speaks to him through the “vertical eyes” of wall outlets, as Ludi is a whiz with electrical circuits and hardware. Though Ludi is hospitalized, medicated and thoroughly analyzed, he refuses to give up his famous alter ego. He is taken in by two halfway housekeepers, Brett and Ann, and becomes convinced that the latter is his “Immortal Beloved.” When Brett is found dead, Ludi is suspected, and flees, leaving in his wake only a cryptic letter. This letter, written as if from the hand of Beethoven himself, is eventually bought by a wealthy music collector, who sets out to ascertain its origins and validity. Throughout the novel, Shearer is clearly fascinated by the question of whether Ludi is happier when sick or well. A philosopher by trade, he asks pertinent questions about the nature of reality and the differing but no less ‘real’ point of view that the mentally ill possess. The novel lags slightly when Shearer’s voicing Ludi, as his manic, hallucinatory rants can be difficult to follow. It’s a tall order to peg the tone of a schizophrenic, and fortunately the author employs several narrative techniques to interrupt the madness, including police reports and transcripts of interviews with Ludi’s psychiatrist. The book will be most enjoyable to readers learned in classical music, as Shearer is clearly a connoisseur and employs a number of advanced terms. There is an abundance of insular, almost academic bits of dialogue and humor, but the reader who diligently wades through will be rewarded in the end.
An intense, enjoyable piece for the erudite music lover.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2008
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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