We are left with a memorable landscape of oppression but a problematic central figure. Is Mary now a militant champion of...
The sexual exploitation of poor black women in the British Caribbean—in a rambling, plotless tale (winner of the Giller Prize) from Clarke, a veteran West Indian writer/academic/diplomat.
The colony is the author’s own Barbados (here called Bimshire), and the period is post-WWII. Mary-Mathilda is a middle-aged black woman who lives in a spacious house on the sugar plantation, where she was installed by the almost-white plantation manager Bellfeels, who lives nearby with his wife and daughters. Bellfeels’s “Outside-Woman,” Mary started out, like her mother, as a fieldhand, and her fate was decided one Sunday in a churchyard when Bellfeels noticed her ripening into puberty and felt her up and down with his riding-crop, the prelude to his raping her during a church picnic, just as he had once done to her mother. For all her present material comforts, Mary has never forgotten that riding-crop, and she has been readying her old hoe for her mission of retribution and sacrifice. The story spans just a few hours on a Sunday night, when Mary summons the Sergeant to make a Statement. Has she murdered Bellfeels? The Sergeant doesn’t want to know, for Mary is a powerful woman who could end his career, and, besides he has lusted after her since childhood. So there will be no Statement, disappointing the reader who might have been expecting a modicum of suspense. Instead, the pair exchange memories of life in Bimshire. What emerges is a scorching indictment of the island’s power elite, who have connived at rape (including Mary’s) and murder, disposing of bodies and spiriting away criminals. Still, this bleak picture is warmed and softened by Clarke’s celebration of Bimshire life: its foods, plants, rum shops, and the fortitude of its regular folks as they laugh and curse in cadences that Clarke catches so expertly.
We are left with a memorable landscape of oppression but a problematic central figure. Is Mary now a militant champion of women’s rights? No way to know.Pub Date: June 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-055565-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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