Both celebration and condemnation of war, this Iliad manages to speak to yet another generation that needs desperately to...
One of the greatest stories of all time is briskly retold in the award-winning Italian author’s fifth novel (Without Blood, 2004, etc.).
In two author’s notes, Baricco identifies his version of Homer’s eponymous epic poem as the fruit of a recently staged public reading, and his realization that the poem “as it has come down to us was unreadable.” Well, yes and no. Still, there’s much to be said for Baricco’s skillful distillation of Homer into a trim narrative shorn of the gods’ machinations and focused on the motivations of various Achaean invaders (headstrong King Agamemnon, Machiavellian strategist Odysseus, vainglorious hero Achilles) and their Trojan counterparts (aged King Priam, his noble and intrepid son Hector and the duplicitous Paris—whose “theft” of the Achaean Menelaus’s beautiful wife Helen ignited the long-enduring conflict). The story is told piecemeal, as a kind of oral history spoken (from beyond the grave) by the combatants, their sorrowing women and such peripheral characters as the Nurse who describes Hector’s dismissal of his wife Andromache’s prophetic fears, “The River,” which relates the single combat between Achilles and the Trojan warrior Aeneas that bloodied its waters and the bard Demodocus, who tells as aftermath the story of the Trojan horse and the ultimate destruction of Troy. Obviously, something is lost in omitting the gods’ intercessions, which vary the content and pace of Homer’s immortal original, making it far more than a catalogue of battlefield exploits. But Baricco describes such actions superbly, and creates a persuasive atmosphere of character-driven impending doom. And Goldstein’s vivid translation conjures some spectacular visual effects (e.g., “horses . . . ran wild, pulling empty chariots and mourning their drivers, who now lay on the ground, more loved by the vultures than by their wives”).
Both celebration and condemnation of war, this Iliad manages to speak to yet another generation that needs desperately to hear its message.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26355-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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