The serpentine and confusing plot aside, musicologist Dunlap’s first offers a vivid, entertaining panorama of the period.
A young singer is ensnared by intrigue at the Sun King’s court.
Émilie Jolicoeur, the daughter of a luthier, is 15 when she and her phenomenal soprano are noticed by (real-life) composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier during a visit to her father’s Paris atelier. Charpentier begins teaching her in his studio at the grand house of his patroness, the Duchesse de Guise. Meanwhile, the duchess’s godson, impoverished aristocrat Comte de St. Paul, seeks to exploit the enmity between Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s current mistress, and fête-pooper Madame de Maintenon, 17th-century Versailles’ answer to Billy Sunday. When he hears Émilie sing at his godmother’s soirée, St. Paul sees his ticket out of debt. He conspires with Madame de Maintenon to spirit Émilie to Versailles. They plan to introduce the songbird at court and eventually to the king’s bed; with the help of some time-release poison, the assignation will be enough to put Louis off whoopie in general and Montespan in particular. Montespan, no fool, makes arrangements to have the now 16-year-old Émilie re-abducted after her performance as Alceste in an opera by Lully, Charpentier’s archrival. The re-abductor will be Charpentier, Émilie’s heartthrob. Maintenon is relieved to hear this, because poisoning ingénues is against her religion. Émilie, having captivated the king as Alceste, receives a jeweled brooch and an invitation to present herself at the royal chambers around midnight. Hedging her bets, Maintenon sends her servant François to Émilie’s room with the killer claret. Beset by pre-re-abduction misgivings, Émilie is teetering on her windowsill when...Faked death, a new identity, a secret marriage, a miscarriage, a duel and a re-re-abduction follow, amid a dizzying array of purloined letters, spies and contretemps. Even Guise’s maid, Sophie, gets her own subplot.
The serpentine and confusing plot aside, musicologist Dunlap’s first offers a vivid, entertaining panorama of the period.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6506-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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