Full-hearted, believable writing in an enjoyable travel tale.
After his brother’s death, a young American sets out to backpack around Europe in this debut novel.
Stephen Kylemore’s fixation with travel comes in part from reading “too many novels.” From an early age, he took to perusing the books his elder brother, Edward, left behind. During a tour of duty in Vietnam, Edward writes to Stephen, recommending he read Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander. When Edward is killed in battle, the novel is returned home as part of his effects. Stephen reads the book over the course of one evening and is fascinated by the mystical setting of Catalonia. He purchases a one-peseta Catalonian coin for good luck and as a reminder of his brother and starts to plan the journey that in happier circumstances he and Edward would have taken together. Leaving behind his partner, Pam, Stephen takes a flight from New York to London and begins his adventure. His initial target destination is Grettstadt in Germany, where he believes his old boss will set him up with a job. He meanders his way there, first catching a ferry to the Netherlands and then hitchhiking. His mind regularly turns to the love he left behind, his lost brother, and the hope of finally arriving in Catalonia. The novel captures the naiveté of a young, wide-eyed American traveling overseas for the first time—comparing all that he encounters to home: “Tiny cars, large black taxis and double-decker buses drove on the wrong side of the street. Still, it seemed a bit staged, as if this weren’t real.” Such passages read as extracts from a travel diary, and as a consequence it is easy to forget that this is a work of fiction. In Stephen, Ried has created a believable and likable first-person narrator that speaks with a simple sincerity: “I loved my brother and I hated war, but I was resolved that my life would be enriched, not shrouded, by his memory.” The author’s prose never displays the fervid passion for the road found in Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler nor captures the vulnerability of being penniless and exposed to the grime of the urban underbelly evoked in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. But Ried’s narrative earnestness is sufficiently beguiling to make this an emotionally engaging travel novel that will prove difficult to put down.
Full-hearted, believable writing in an enjoyable travel tale.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-949085-02-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CKBooks Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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