A thoroughly idiosyncratic work of biographical collage.
Vel combines fiction and history in this unorthodox account of the life of President Abraham Lincoln.
As previous biographies of the Great Emancipator have done, this volume recounts Lincoln’s life from his humble origins in Kentucky to his assassination in Ford’s Theatre. What Vel does differently, however, is to lay a thick filter of non-Western mythology over the tale. After a “Forewarning” that includes a few fables from the Indian subcontinent, the author introduces a frame narrative that involves a God and a Goddess traveling around the world. After they witness a slave auction that offends the Goddess’ moral sensibilities, the two deities work together to create a man who will end slavery in America. They take turns, with each offering attributes that they think will help this favored being. They don’t always agree; for example, as the Goddess reviews God’s assigned attributes, she asks, “Restlessness, melancholy and transience! Are you blessing or cursing?” The biography then begins in earnest, relating each section of Lincoln’s life as a sequence of anecdotes, quotes, and memories, often with the help of a first-person narrator. Vel inhabits the voices of various witnesses to the president’s life, from obscure figures such as Dennis Hanks (Lincoln’s second cousin) and William H. Herndon (Lincoln’s law partner and biographer) to such notables as statesman Frederick Douglass and Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The God and Goddess also pop back in from time to time to observe Lincoln’s progress and offer supplemental information, such as an account of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Vel doesn’t appear to have done any original research for the book; footnotes show that most of the historical information came from the same four Lincoln biographies. Aside from the deities and narrators, the reading experience is much more akin to that of nonfiction than fiction; the mix of diary entries, annotations, and apocrypha never fuses into any cohesive narrative. But because Vel offers almost no commentary or historical context, the book does present an intriguing picture of Abraham Lincoln as a semidivine folk hero—a product of a backward present and yet somehow removed from time.
A thoroughly idiosyncratic work of biographical collage.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1483418094
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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