Marlowe's 12th novel (The Lighthouse at the End of the World, 1995, etc.) follows the pattern of his fictional portraits of Christopher Columbus and Edgar Allan Poe, as he surveys the life and times of the Renaissance soldier-writer who was Shakespeare's exact contemporary and who earned immortality as the author of Don Quixote. The story is told by Cervantes, long after his death, and concentrates less on his literary vocation than on his colorful life as a man of action during the days of his native Spain's war with the Turks and its ill-fated attack on Great Britain. The narrative races through Miguel's undistinguished origins as the son of a barber, his defense of his (less than virginal) sister's honor in a duel in which he kills his opponent, his consequent enlistment in the Navy and service at the battle of Lepanto (where he loses his left hand), his imprisonment at Algiers, and his later struggles as an impotent husband and frustrated lover, government spy (during which employment he encounters the similarly occupied Christopher Marlowe), and finally, as a reviled and embattled author. Oddly, the most convincing portions of the story are those in which Marlowe allows us, too briefly, to observe Cervantes the writer—meeting and debating literary art with such worthies as the amusingly Waspish Italian poet Torquato Tasso and with the celebrated playwright Lope de Vega; attempting to memorialize his exploits in abortive plays; and meeting the popular playwright William Shakespeare (who's blandly indifferent to the fate of the stage works he keeps dependably churning out). The story is consistently entertaining, but one longs for some greater sense of the intellectual presence of the genius whose work must surely have been the product of an extraordinary inner life. Here, that life is pretty much subordinated to a recounting of exterior experiences. It would be inappropriate to call this imperfectly satisfying performance Cervantes Lite. Still, one glimpses, and misses, the novel it might have been.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-358-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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