by Sammy Mapes ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2012
A stylistically ambitious, hyperintellectual but riotously overwritten novel.
In this debut novel, generations of Southern preachers ponder abstruse philosophy in a meditation on religion, language—and almost everything else.
Mapes’ saga commences in 1832 when a schism in The Church of The Reconstructed Dunkers sends itinerant pastor Loyal Larkin heading south from Tennessee into Alabama. The dispute, about which Bible to use, is carried on in both academic jargon (“a definitional structure lent an authority, in fact a double authority, in addition to the transporting and utterly edifying language present in the King James Bible”) and Southern trash-talk (“Well, if a toady frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass”), which sets the tone of the alternately vulgar and highfalutin palaver to come. The narrative vaguely follows Loyal and his descendants through the Civil War in an episodic blur of literary allusions—a Faulknerian jape in which a child emerging from a coffin startles the dentures out of a lady; a hanging inspired by Ambrose Bierce; a Hawthorne-like predicament involving a fallen woman—then jumps ahead to the life of modern-day minister Sissy-Jane Hannah Larkin Laputa and her flock in South Aintry, Louisiana. But the rickety story is just a pretext for the characters to talk endlessly, turgidly and mostly to themselves about various deep thoughts; these are further elaborated in long excerpts from writers from Kierkegaard to Marshall McLuhan, whose spirit presides over the book’s fixation on communications technology. Mapes is an inventive writer whose prose sometimes achieves a nonsensical poetry that James Joyce might have appreciated (“Stinking fitchew flag-fallen in flam, no longer has a gadling to walk the path, only garabee gallanting, peddling gammon and garboil”). Unfortunately, his cogitations are so dense, obscure and ill-digested—“How does a lost thingness fetch back, in renewal, its contra positive reborn appositionally?”—that readers’ eyes may soon glaze over.
A stylistically ambitious, hyperintellectual but riotously overwritten novel.Pub Date: April 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468525649
Page Count: 206
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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