Swedish writer Ekman, author of 17 novels, debuts in English with this prizewinning thriller: a literary crime story for readers who thought Peter Heg's Smilla's Sense of Snow was too upbeat. Arriving at the Swedish commune Starhill to join her lover Dan Ulander, Annie Raft stumbles on two corpses lying in a tent and sees a boy running from the scene. Eighteen years later, she and her daughter, Mia, see the boy, now grown to manhood. Before Annie can tell the authorities that she's recognized their only lead in the unsolved case, Mia is killed. But alert readers will long since have surmised that the boy she saw was Johan Brandberg, who fled his miserable family after escaping from the well his resentful stepbrothers had lowered him into. Taking with him an eel he rescued from the well, Johan had hitchhiked with an older woman calling herself Ylja across the border to Norway, where the woman briskly relieved him of his virginity, established him as the latest incarnation of the mystical Traveler who was prophesied to arrive with a live animal, and finally drove him away. The frenzy of isolation to which Ylja pushes Johan is mirrored by Annie's own alienation back in Starhill, where the hatred of Swedes for Lapps and commune members for the bourgeois who surround them—not to mention the rivalries within the commune—finally reaches toxic proportions. In an Arctic landscape whose grim determinism recalls Hardy, commune families grow, harden into deformity, or split up with chill fatalism, and readers impatient with Ekman's brooding vignettes of calcifying loneliness are likely to feel like polar explorers trudging along under heavy loads in the worst weather, hoping to find, in the aftermath of Johan's return, the key that will redeem their ordeal in a burst of wild insight. Not for the impatient or fainthearted: a dour study of murder as the logical outgrowth of simmering, all-consuming rage.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48178-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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