None
An exquisitely mounted, immaculately designed fable in a jeweled medieval setting that pierces to the heart of an ancient scholarly/spiritual dilemma: Should one live within a world of faith with its invisible perfections—or only in the world as it is seen and sensed, of things as they are? The author portrays the conflict with venerable theological dialectic and an inventive use of the enduring myth of the wolf-raised child. Quoting St. Augustine to the effect that ``morning knowledge is different from evening knowledge,'' the gentle scholar Benedix explains the problem to Severo, the cardinal prince of their Church-owned island: in the knowledge of angels, morning knowledge deals with ``the nature of a straight line; evening knowledge is knowing that no line in the world is really straight.'' Severo has come to the monastery for help in converting an avowed atheist, Palinor, a stranger from a far country—handsome, highly intelligent and companionable. Severo is determined to save Palinor from a heretic's death. Meanwhile, a wild creature raised by wolves is captured, and Severo sends her to a convent to be tamed—but with the stern stipulation that she hear nothing of God. Will then the denial of God-knowledge in a child of nature—proving that knowledge of God is revealed and not innate—save Palinor? While the wolf child is (outwardly, at least) ``humanized,'' the cardinal, the famous scholar, and the atheist meet in a paradisiacal setting of greenery, fountains, and colonnades to discuss philosophy and theology. But looming, gathering savagery and horror, is the Inquisition, about to bring death to one and, for others, the absence of angels. At the close, the wolf girl sees—without understanding—the start of an inevitable conquest. With timeless personalities, grounded firmly within the hot windstorms of an on-going human conundrum: a brilliantly crafted, haunting tale—the author's second novel for adults (after a mystery, The Wyndham Case, 1993).
None NonePub Date: March 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-68666-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
IN THE NEWS
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
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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