Deftly plotted though occasionally heavy-handed, as the boys shoulder more symbolic weight than 11-year-olds should.
A political parable that operates on various levels, from suspense to polemic.
Originally published in the author’s native Italy in 2008, this debut novel details the events of 30 years earlier, when the Red Brigades kidnapped the leader of the Christian Democratics, committed murder and wreaked terror upon the country. Against that political backdrop (which recedes as the novel progresses), three 11-year-old boys from the Sicilian city of Palermo find their lives transformed by the inspiration of the Red Brigades and the cultural critique that its seemingly senseless violence has visited on their homeland. “I was an ideological, focused, intense little boy, a non-ironic, anti-ironic, refractory little boy—a non-little boy,” writes the narrator, who has taken the name Nimbus, in solidarity with his comrades, led by the oddly charismatic, reductively ruthless Flight. The three of them (Radius completes the trio) escalate their fantasy subversion from coded language and assumed identities into crimes with real consequences—arson, kidnapping, murder. “We must abandon identity, relinquish the ego in favor of the group,” proclaims Flight, who is also prepared to relinquish morality and basic human values for the sake of a greater good, which is never really defined, either by the three boys or by the Red Brigades they aspire to emulate. Yet, says the narrator after watching a film, “it was the epitome of 1978, its mannerisms and its poses: wandering around aimlessly while claiming to have a strategy, indulging in lachrymose self-criticism, and continually regurgitating the same tired language.” Language in the novel is variously an epidemic, a crime, a tool, a means of exile, a boundless existence. Ultimately, the precociously innocent, language-obsessed narrator must make a choice between the inchoate ideology that has given him new life and identity and a girl he barely knows: “Whenever I looked at her I felt a religion form within me, a need for tenderness—the very need that the struggle daily excluded.”
Deftly plotted though occasionally heavy-handed, as the boys shoulder more symbolic weight than 11-year-olds should.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-86547-937-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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