A gentle, intelligent exercise in nihilism: Life, Jelloun seems to say with a pained smile, is hardly worth discussing.
In this consideration of the meaning of friendship, desertion and lies become an expression of loyalty.
Mamed and Ali have been best friends since their school days in Tangiers. They discover sex together, in brothels and with their willing but necessarily circumspect peers—girls who cheerfully embrace sodomy as a means of preserving their virginity for marriage. Through aimlessness as much as conviction, they become involved in left-wing politics, and both are imprisoned. In prison, each man saves the other’s life. Although both marry women who are jealous of the friendship, it survives, remaining the main relationship in the men’s lives even after Mamed leaves Tangiers to take a long-term job in Stockholm. One day, without warning and for apparently fanciful reasons, Mamed turns on Ali, brutally accuses him of using the friendship to steal from Mamed’s family, and refuses to ever see or speak to him again. Ben Jelloun (Islam Explained, 2002, etc.) tells his story in three first-person narratives: The first is from the perspective of Ali, the abandoned friend; then Mamed tells the same history, exposing the reason for his rejection of Ali; finally, a mutual friend of both adds a postscript. This structure is employed to depict the delicate shades of difference between similar minds. The tone is placid, at times almost bored. The only characters of importance are the friends, and the book suggests that the ultimate significance of a life can be expressed in a single relationship. In making that relationship humdrum, passionless and lacking in substance, the author has produced a work that may be likened to a long, disappointed sigh.
A gentle, intelligent exercise in nihilism: Life, Jelloun seems to say with a pained smile, is hardly worth discussing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-59558-008-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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