An amusing but shallow diversion whose Gurdjieff-like dialogue (“Can you describe this love you are seeking?”) can be either...
New Age fable by first-novelist Housden (Sacred America, 1999, etc.) about the peregrinations of a young Greek icon painter who wanders from Florence to Istanbul in search of enlightenment.
To Greek Orthodox believers, icons are far more than works of religious art: they are holy objects in themselves, as worthy of veneration as the relics of a saint or the words of Holy Scripture. Those who create such works are invariably deeply religious, although they aren’t necessarily monks or nuns. The Greco-Italian icon painter Georgiou was born into the trade, so to speak: His father Stefanou had been an icon painter, and he had trained Georgiou in the craft. As a young man growing up in Florence in the 1950s, Georgiou was surrounded by magnificent art—Fra Angelico being his favorite—but he was a restless soul, always eager to travel and discover new worlds. His friend Andros, although nearly as old as Georgiou’s father, understands his wanderlust and provides Georgiou with letters of introduction to a monk of the Greek monastery at Mount Athos and to a Sufi dervish in Turkey. With his father’s blessing, Georgiou sets out to meet these men, who he hopes can offer him the spiritual enlightenment he craves. On Mount Athos, the monastic republic where no woman has set foot in more than a thousand years, Georgiou immerses himself in the study of the Virgin Mother, who he learns is a descendent of the ancient pagan earth goddesses. In Turkey, he is schooled in Sufi mysticism by a dervish and undergoes a series of mystical episodes that confirm him in his vocation as a painter. At last he returns to Florence, falls in love, marries, and lives happily ever after.
An amusing but shallow diversion whose Gurdjieff-like dialogue (“Can you describe this love you are seeking?”) can be either annoying or hilarious depending on your frame of mind—as can the entire story.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008445-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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