A drifting, unhurried escape into the insular life of a small town in Greece.
Kerr’s debut novel about life in an imaginary rural town in Greece during the 1990s.
Allan Krokkos is a newly arrived Scottish ex-pat living in the remote town of Sophiapolis in southern Greece in the prefecture of Arcadia. He decides to settle in Arcadia, “abode of the Gods, to search for whatever I did not have or to abandon what I felt had weighed me down from reaching to the heights of contentment.” Sophiapolis, however, is hardly the utopia it first seems. With the studious eye of an outsider camped at a local cafe, Krokkos describes the goings-on of the other ex-pats and townspeople, and the picture of a Peloponnesian town emerges, replete with rich Greek culture and customs, quiet lives and hidden stories, and the usual small-town pettiness and betrayals. Dozens of characters struggle to find validation and meaning in their lives. Between souvlakia and Greek coffee, there’s plenty of gossip and talk of history, music and politics, as Krokkos delves deeper into the lives of his friend, Idris, an ex-pat teacher; Dimitra, known by some as the town seductress; the xenophobic Evie Riga, director of the Westminster School; and others. A collection of character vignettes without a plot, Kerr’s novel is a pastiche of Cornell Woolrich’s voyeuristic short story “It Had to Be Murder” (1942) and Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place (1956), only less sordid and without the intrigue of an unsolved murder. Deprived of a narrative arc, the townspeople’s tangled, hidden lives provide the interest. Thankfully, like the bouquet of a fine Greek wine, Kerr’s prose sometimes evokes literary notes: “I had a compulsive habit of arriving in a place or situation too late. My own birth under some starry northern sky had taken me on a journey of missed boats and late trains.” But in the end, there’s still no story here other than the never-ending little dramas of a claustrophobic town, which soon wear thin.
A drifting, unhurried escape into the insular life of a small town in Greece.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491003596
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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