Again using the device of a text-within-a-text, Norwegian writer Gaarder (The Christmas Mystery, 1996, etc.) presents the story of the woman whom Augustine abandoned when he answered God's call to the celibate life. In a brief introduction, the author describes how he stumbled upon an ancient Latin manuscript in a Buenos Aires bookshop, then bought it, believing it to be the only known letter to Augustine from Floria, his lover and the mother of his son. Written in response to Augustine's Confessions, which she has just read, the letter has the biting tone of a woman scorned, but also the drive of a fearless intellect, one able point by point to poke holes in Augustine's defense of his conversion, wittily wielding the big guns of classical philosophy from Aristotle to Cicero on her own behalf. As Floria coolly dismantles Augustine's faith, showing it to be selfish and contradictory, she doesn't shy away from memories of her former intimacy with him: their first meeting beneath a fig tree in Carthage; the youthful excesses of her ``little itchy- fingered bedfellow''; the interference of Augustine's mother, Monica, who wanted him to marry someone his social equal and who came all the way to Milan to split up the two of them, forcing Floria to leave Augustine and their son and go back to Carthage; and the couple's final meeting in Rome after Monica's death, when a few passionate weeks abruptly ended with the man of God beating his temptress until she bled, then apologizing in tears for his brutality. For all her bitterness, though, Floria also writes with compassion; her judgment, tempered by love and worldliness, never condemns even when discussing their dead son, whom she never saw again after she left Milan. A colorful exercise in breathing life into classical texts, but one that unhappily fails to loose the ties that bind it to the role of commentary, thus falling short of life as a full-fledged work of fiction.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-25384-6
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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 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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