The sole instance of a Tibetan novel, this 18th-century classic—in a first English translation—uses romance, war, and intrigue to depict the path to bodhisattva practice. Tshe ring dbang rgyal (1697-1763) is one of the great figures in Tibetan literature. Having begun studies at Sera Monastery at age five, he eventually chose a political career as a layman and during very turbulent years rose to become the most important man in Tibet after the Dalai Lama. Here, he tells the fictional life story of one Prince Kumaradvitiya, who uses diplomacy, kidnapping, and finally force of arms to win the beautiful Princess Manohari. While the two are enjoying conjugal bliss, Kumaradvitiya's father takes a new wife, Lavanya, and her father insists that the son produced by this union should inherit the throne. When they return home, Kumaradvitiya and Manohari befriend the boy and the prince agrees to act as regent for his half-brother. He has already been thinking of the ascetic life, and, when Lavanya unsuccessfully tries to seduce him, he's sent by her into exile, where he becomes a forest hermit and attains enlightenment. The complex story ends with a lyrical celebration of the prince's bodhicitta mind as he returns to the world to aid all beings. Tshe ring dbang rgyal's story uses poetry as well as prose, abounds in florid adjectives and metaphors, and frequently interposes Buddhist reflections as the action unfolds. In a helpful if brief introduction, translator Newman describes the author's religious and cultural background and use of Hindu sources for Buddhist ends. It is a pity that her English style (``Today I have the chance to have intercourse / With the amalgam of worldly beauty's essence'') frequently fails to do justice either to the novel's literary status or to her own Tibetan scholarship. Still, essential reading for lovers of Tibet, Buddhism, and epic literature.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017400-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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