Young American journalist loses his humanistic illusions in a small, revolution-torn Third World country situated off the coast of Asia. Packer, whose The Village of Waiting (1988) told of his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa, shifts not only eastward but into fictional territory staked out by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene: White Westerner confronted by an alien have-not world that he only half understands. Daniel Levin, reared in suburban Philadelphia, accepts an assignment to the island nation of Direv Sauran to find out the truth about its civil war and to test his mettle. His restiveness on the island is emphasized by an unsatisfactory visit from his stateside fiancÇe, who can't understand his obsession with the country. He leaves her in the capital city for an exclusive interview with the revolutionary leader, Fra Boboy, in his mountain fastness among a people whose name for a white is ``Ngot'' (Half Man), their forest bogeyman. Boboy's view is that the East/West ideological struggle is dead ``and history is born in bastard lands.'' Levin is accompanied on the trip by Ding, an educated, once well-to-do Sauranan photographer split between his native culture and Western trappings. Packer's descriptions of the country—its sights, sounds, and smells—are remarkably vivid, and the trip to the revolutionary redoubt is high adventure. But the major flaw in this otherwise gripping novel is the amount of space given to long ideological/philosophical debates, which have a stagy air and often descend into obscurity. Fra Boboy, whose doctoral dissertation was on Sacrifice, Impurity, State: Structures of Self and Violence in Modern Primitive Society, doesn't ring true as a man of action. And Levin's self-probing lacks real weight. Striking depiction of an impoverished Asian country caught up in a post-cold war revolutionary struggle—but excessive philosophizing chips away at credibility and readability.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58192-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
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
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