Lebanese journalist and author Maalouf's (Leo Africanus, 1988, etc.) Goncourt Prizewinning historical romance is lyrical and poetic. Set in the Lebanese village of Kfaryabda, the novel skips merrily from the present into the late 19th century as an aged townsman tells his nephew the story of Lamia and Tanios. Lamia, the wife of an official in the court of the local potentate, is so beautiful that her pulchritude has become proverbial in the region, and the Sheikh becomes determined to have her. He seduces her, and Lamia bears a child. Despite the secrecy and brevity of their tryst, rumors begin to circulate in the court and in the village that the child is the Sheikh's. Tanios, the child, grows up with the best that can be provided, including an education at a foreign mission school. It is a period when Lebanon is the center of a great political game: Egypt and the Ottoman Empire contend against each other; France and Britain jockey for position; Islam and Christianity jostle; rebellion against the hierarchical political structure is brewing; and intrigue abounds. When Tanios's legal father (Lamia's husband) kills the Patriarch, the Christian leader of the village and a rival in the Sheikh's court, he and Tanios are forced to flee. Beginning their flight in terror and remorse, the two fugitives soon become embroiled in the machinations tearing the country apart. Eventually it becomes clear that only they can put a halt to the troubles, and they emerge as unlikely mediators in the diplomatic wrangling. The book's title derives from an unusual rock formation, resembling a great stone chair, that dominates the village. Local legend has it that Tanios, who has taken on mythic status, sat on the chair and was never seen again. Magical and compelling, the novel is the work of a master stylist, rendered in a subtle and supple translation.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8076-1365-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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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