Literate. Brilliant. Entertaining.
Reaching back to the tumultuous 15th century, Jerusalmy chronicles a fictional tale of real-life brigand/poet François Villon, dispatched to find The Brotherhood of Book Hunters.
Jerusalmy’s dense and erudite narrative begins in Paris. Villon has been imprisoned for his writings, but Louis XI and Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris, are scheming to break Rome’s hold over France. The pair want Villon to lure Johann Fust, a Gutenberg ally, to Paris to establish a printing concern to make his books more available. The king’s plot later expands. He forces Villon and Colin de Cayeux, another Coquillard bandit, to journey to Jerusalem, “homeland of prophets and psalmists, peasants and fallen angels.” They’re to find the shadowy Brotherhood, an eclectic collection of Jews, revisionist Christians and others intent on preserving the world’s knowledge, and secure books to supply the Paris printing presses. As the hardy pair trek “from Rue St. Jacques to Genoa, from Acre to the monastery in Galilee and to Safed,” characters abound: the fashionable fop and de’ Medici agent Federico Castaldi; archivist Brother Médard, a cranky, combative dwarf; and young Rabbi Gamliel ben Sira, gaon of Safed, who speaks for the Brotherhood’s secret leader. In the library, located deep underground in “Invisible Jerusalem,” Villon learns the Brotherhood’s collection includes the “overwhelming testament dictated by Jesus to the high priest Annas just before his arrest,” a document critical to the Papacy and freethinkers alike. In deft translation, the novel sparkles with fanciful descriptions—“He would throw a judicious quotation at an eminent rival as you throw a knife at a straw target”—and Machiavellian machinations, highlighted by scholarly but accessible ruminations on Aristotle and Plato, religion and humanism, which are symbolically relevant to the forces gathering to bring on Reformation and Enlightenment, “to free the word from those who had been keeping it hostage in their chapels and cellars for centuries.”
Literate. Brilliant. Entertaining.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-230-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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