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GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS

Name: GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS
Author: John Updike
ISBN: 0-375-40908-4

by John Updike ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2000

One of Updike’s more intriguing experiments – but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)

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A risky and ultimately unsatisfying departure from what we’ve come to think of as Updike’s distinctive territory: suburbia and its discontents.

Here, he retells the story of Hamlet’s mother, the adulterous queen, and her brother-in-law and lover, in the years leading to Prince “Amleth’s” return from college in Wittenberg, to bury his father and attend the marriage of his mother and uncle. Updike’s sources include Shakespeare’s primary one, Saxo Grammaticus’ 12th-century Historia Danica, as well as Hamlet itself, from which he quotes sporadically (noting, for instance, that the lovers exchange “reechy kisses”). The novel is best in its first half: a clever re-creation of late medieval Scandinavia’s tangled power struggles and of the austere court of famed warrior Horwendil the Jute, who wed reluctant young “Gerutha” and became king of Denmark (then Zealand) upon her father’s death. The sly figure of Horwendil’s “dark” brother Feng(on), a “freelance” adventurer whose tales of foreign lands seduce Gerutha (exactly as Othello’s enchanted Desdemona) into intimacy, is quite convincingly evoked. Alas, once Gerutha and “Feng” (later Gertrude and Claudius, for reasons only partially spelt out) hit the sheets (this is Updike, after all), the hitherto lean and credibly stately prose often becomes, if not quite royal, certifiably purple (“Surges of sensation in her lower parts lifted her so high her voice was flung from her like a bird’s lost call”). It isn’t all risible, though. Long restrained tensions between “King Hamlet” (his name likewise having changed) and the wily Feng explode in a taut confrontation scene. Gertrude’s transformation from unwilling bride to weary, guilt-ridden matron is deftly traced. And the offstage presence, as it were, of her brooding, “theatrical” son – an aggrieved time bomb ticking steadily away – is expertly sketched in. Yet the abrupt inconclusive ending (even though we know precisely what’s to come) is almost certainly a mistake.

One of Updike’s more intriguing experiments – but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-40908-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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by Robert Harris

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by Robert Harris

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by Robert Harris

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- BOOK TO SCREEN
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- BOOK TO SCREEN
Literary Adaptations Score Multiple Oscar Nods

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.