Once past its odd, sluggish opening, and not yet as far as its final ’scene," a reader finds much to enjoy in Sontag’s highly researched fourth novel (The Volcano Lover, 1992, etc.). It's a fictionalization of the American experience of celebrated Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska (here named Maryna Dembowska): first, as queen of an entourage that includes her family and her lover (Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, called here Ryszard Kierul) and that joins a farming commune in California; next, as center star on a spectacularly successful extended tour that begins in Nevada ("making miners weep")) and ends in New York and London; then as working partner with American thespian Edwin Booth, another of the many men who threw themselves at her feet. Maryna’s epic story begins as a speculation hatched in the mind of a nameless woman narrator who, accidentally observing a private party in a hotel dining-room, "conjures up" the histories of its evidently foreign-born participants. The tale, thus begun, assumes several forms: a straightforward narrative of the move from embattled Poland to America as undertaken by Maryna and her second husband, Count Bogdan Dembowski, her three children, and several friends (notably, her importunate lover Ryszard); second, scenes from these and other characters’ viewpoints; third, Maryna’s letters home to her admiring physician "" Henryk; fourth, Bogdan’s diary, recording both his passive deference to Maryna’s wishes and his fleeting homosexual impulses; and finally, strangest of all, a monologue "addressed" by Edwin Booth to his new stage partner, the triumphant Maryna. The heart of the story is Sontag’s account of Maryna’s conquest of America: a wonderfully ironic, episodic chronicle of culture shock that includes a wittily described meeting with Henry James (who, it’s implied, will immortalize Maryna in The Tragic Muse). Lamentably shapeless. Yet, though Sontag may not be a novelist, really, she enlightens and entertains in what becomes, against rather long odds, a surprisingly lighthearted and likable book.
Pub Date: March 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-17540-3
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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