A well-constructed, action-packed novel.
One man’s quest for power centers on an ancient artifact in this international thriller.
Nina Monte is an academic expert on religious antiquities and has spent much of her adult life thinking only about the past. But that changes when she’s recruited by an Italian government agency to evaluate a relic found on a 15th-century galley. This prospect excites Nina, as she feels that “something else awaited her there; something, she sensed, that had been there a long, long time. Something of value that was far beyond measurable.” After she arrives at Lake Garda, the relic’s location, she meets lonely hotelier Alessandro Pini, who soon becomes her partner in her adventure. She quickly discovers that the inquiry is actually a ruse by treasure hunter Lammert van der Venn, who’s discovered an ancient stone tablet and wants Nina to decipher its writings. Van der Venn thinks that the tablet’s mantras will grant him power: “I’ll be among those who walked into the Kingdom of Heaven, alive,” he says to Nina, who refuses to help him after finding out what kind of man he is—so he sets his sights on her Indian grandmother Sati who first told her about the tablet years before. Soon the race is on to find Sati, with Nina and Alessandro pitted against van der Ven and his henchmen. Chrusciel (Illusive Intrusion, 2014) uses detailed research to add necessary authenticity to scenes set in Germany, Italy, Austria, and India, such as in this description of Milan’s Piazza del Duomo: “In the middle of the square, to her right, she passed the monument of King Victor Emanuel II, who watched over the Gothic cathedral and other surrounding buildings.” His characters develop throughout the novel, as bookish Nina and mousy Alessandro do more than they ever thought they could do in order to help those they love. The story’s pacing is appropriately breakneck as the couple hurry around the globe and stay just ahead of van der Venn’s lurking shadow. In the end, the tablet’s mysterious powers remain nebulous, but just enough is revealed to suggest that no one should possess them.
A well-constructed, action-packed novel.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9929574-3-8
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Agato House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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