Meandering and unfocused, written with a labored simplicity that will remind many of another well-meaning Western chronicler...
A carefully researched if rather ho-hum tale about a Japanese courtesan who scorns all but one of the men obsessed with her: the latest from the prolific Schaeffer (The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat 1998, etc.).
Lady Utsu is a cruel mistress, as her aged servant Aki knows well. Behind closed screens, the women grind glass in a mortar to kill Lord Tsuronosuke, the uncle of her lover, Lord Norimasa. Knowing that the gluttonous Tsuronosuke will be unable to resist the delicacies set forth at their private feast is just the sort of irony that Lady Utsu relishes. Perhaps she will commemorate the occasion by composing a poem or two. Days later, hearing from Norimasa about Tsuronosuke’s slow, agonizing death brings a faint smile to her delicate lips. But back behind the screens she goes, passing long hours in sewing and scheming with the other women of the palace. She pines for a freedom she cannot have, composes more poetry, and so forth. When not glumly contemplating moonlit gardens or beheading people, Lord Norimasa occasionally visits her or his jealous wife, Lady Tsukie, and their seven ugly children. But Lady Utsu pays little heed—she has seduced Matsuhito, Lord Norimasa’s samurai retainer. Though loyal to his lord, Matsuhito finds the feral charms of Lady Utsu irresistible. Indeed, she is associated in the narrative with wild animals, among them a stray cat that miraculously survives a beating by a servant, and a magical white fox. Wandering through medieval Japan, Matsuhito meets just such a fox in his wanderings, which shape-shifts into Lady Utsu, and the lovers are reunited.
Meandering and unfocused, written with a labored simplicity that will remind many of another well-meaning Western chronicler of the mysterious East: Pearl Buck.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05814-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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