A collection of diverse literary offerings that lacks a coherent structure.
This debut philosophical miscellany includes story fragments, a film treatment, poems, a two-act play, and letters to the editor.
Presented without any framing material, this hodgepodge becomes tough to decipher. Several themes do become apparent: fulmination against society’s restrictions; a writer called Terrence F. Hill; a mysterious figure, Godot-like, called Marcel; the nature of art, spirituality, and sanity. The book begins with a one-page episode centered on an unnamed man, head of the Rangoon police force and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, who uses his acceptance speech to say that he’s being called a great man only after he learned to hate. Next is an epistolary chapter in which Hill, author of novels including The Heart of a Poet, complains of being persecuted “in the thoughts of the devil, or evil, upon all God or nature would allow to receive the thoughts.” (This book exists, and Love’s work quotes from it, but the author never directly identifies himself with Hill.) Next is a film treatment in which a priest blames himself for not rebelling as a boy and bemoans his “tired heart”: “I feel like I’ve been dragging a wounded soldier along with me most of my life. He begged me to leave him behind—but I wouldn’t.” This image does have power, but Love weakens it through explanation: “The wounded soldier stands for the values of the family—and the laws and values that are the foundation of civilization.” A play follows, much in the vein of French absurdists (the author insists otherwise), with some effective dialogue among the confusion: “He lived in a - 30 - Cent - Bus - Ticket—Reality (Pauses) A rider in life, who stayed on the same vehicle and never had to upgrade his fare; he thought he stood on the stilting songs of life.” The film treatment starring the conflicted priest is repeated verbatim; other pieces follow, some looping back to earlier concerns, others seeming quite random, like a medical report in French. The book needs a strong editor to fix distracting errors of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation (for example, “André Sakorov the soviet dissedent wrote at essay in 1958, that was published around the world and was a sensation”).
A collection of diverse literary offerings that lacks a coherent structure.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-8164-1
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2017
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
