Ably explores a bygone milieu while trafficking in high emotional drama.
A historical novel of royal intrigue and Machiavellian machinations, set during the halcyon days of the
18th-century French court, by retired accountant and author Gananathan. The heroine of Gananathan’s emotionally haunting debut is Kathryn Verne, the former lover of the Duke of Orleans. As the book opens, Kathryn has fled the tumult of the city and returned to the country estate where she was raised. She spends the next few hundred pages recalling her life in the royal court, which was experienced fully, wildly and deeply. Kathryn, Gananathan writes, was once a true ingénue, blessed with blue eyes that reflected “innocence coupled with youthful exuberance” and “pink lips” opened “as though about to break into a shy smile.” But her innocence left her open to the advances of the relatively disagreeable Duke of Orleans. The Duke treated young Kathryn with apparent affection until she became pregnant, when he unceremoniously tossed her aside. (Par for the course, unfortunately, as far as 18th-century court life.) Eventually, he became the regent of France, which was another bout of bad news for Kathryn. Her son, Daniel, was kidnapped, and she was forced to go on the lam for the better part of a decade. So where did Daniel vanish to? Is he still alive? This is a hinge point in White Flowers of Yesterday–even as Gananathan moves backwards in time, recounting the splendor of Kathryn’s time among the royals, she ratchets up the suspense. Kathryn eventually finds a modicum of happiness, but not before the reader has been dragged through a long stretch of misery and heartache. Fortunately, the author has a pleasant style, and she dresses up what might have been a flat history lesson with a surfeit of grace and wit. For a reader interested in the social jousting of 18th century France, White Flowers of Yesterday will be a treat.
Ably explores a bygone milieu while trafficking in high emotional drama.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4401-6620-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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