THE MINOTAUR TAKES HIS OWN SWEET TIME

Name: THE MINOTAUR TAKES HIS OWN SWEET TIME
Author: Steven Sherrill
ISBN: 9780895876737

by Steven Sherrill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2016

While its pacing can be an acquired taste, this novel’s juxtaposition of magical realism and the mundane allows for a number...

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In Sherrill's follow-up to The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break (2000), a creature from Greek mythology interacts with a group of eccentric characters in central Pennsylvania.

The clash between monstrous figures from antiquity and the quirks and foibles of the modern world are the stuff from which a host of plots can be mined, from the horrific to the elegiac. As the title of this novel indicates, Sherrill's tone is more matter-of-fact. Here, the Minotaur finds himself adrift in Pennsylvania, taking part in Civil War re-enactments, pondering his half-human, half-bull nature, and conversing with the residents and owners of the motel where he lives. “Converses” might be pushing it: the Minotaur is a protagonist of few words, bull’s head and all, and there’s a memorable disparity between his philosophical musings on everyday life and immortality and the brief and sometimes-nonverbal utterances that he makes throughout the book. There are plenty of quietly mundane and grotesque details: one character blowing his nose without the use of a tissue, for instance. Sherrill notes at one point that “the bull-man was conceived in and born out of the god-awful,” and that sense of an undercurrent of unpleasantness manifests itself most when he befriends a pair of troubled siblings. Slowly, the simulated violence in which he periodically engages gives way to the threat of something more chaotic. The pacing here is relatively languorous and borders on the episodic, but the book's quirks largely add up to an affecting and unpredictable whole.

While its pacing can be an acquired taste, this novel’s juxtaposition of magical realism and the mundane allows for a number of haunting and contemplative moments.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016

ISBN: 9780895876737

Page Count: 288

Publisher: John F. Blair

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOCKTENDER’S HOUSE
by Steven Sherrill

- BOOK REVIEW
VISITS FROM THE DROWNED GIRL
by Steven Sherrill

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KAFKA ON THE SHORE

by Haruki Murakami & translated by Philip Gabriel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2005

A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.

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Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).

In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.

A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.

Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS
by Haruki Murakami ; translated by Philip Gabriel

- BOOK REVIEW
NOVELIST AS A VOCATION
by Haruki Murakami ; translated by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen

- BOOK REVIEW
MURAKAMI T
by Haruki Murakami ; translated by Philip Gabriel

- AWARDS
Haruki Murakami Honored for Lifetime Achievement

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THE BOOK OF LONGINGS

by Sue Monk Kidd ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

A daring concept not so daringly developed.

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In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.

Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.

A daring concept not so daringly developed.