An elegant examination of the people and mores of a particular time and place in the history of the British Empire; perfect...
Campbell’s darkly humorous historical novel follows the iconoclastic life of Cordelia Moran in 19th-century Calcutta.
These well-drawn, decidedly British characters spend their steamy days in India in erudite, witty repartee: “Young Richard set about earning his keep by keeping Delia amused, spying and lying for her, and defending her against the incumbent downstairs staff of crabby, dank cousins from the outskirts of Aix who always appeared to have slicked back their hair with their own sputum.” In Europe, Delia marries a man called only Mr. James, a recent widower in whose house she is recuperating from a medical procedure. After a few years of miscarriages and near-death pregnancies, her husband, who “slid into her bed” one night, dies, freeing Delia to return, wealthier, to India. In India, she enters into a murky relationship with D’mitri Shevchenko, a sinister character who supplies Delia’s dying mother with opiates and may or may not have kidnapped Delia’s ward, Alistair. To redeem Alistair, Delia marries Shevchenko while secretly married to another man, with whom she lives after leaving Shevchenko but with whom she is seldom seen. She grows reclusive as she ages, increasing the mystery surrounding her various adventures and misadventures, all the while remaining the center of attention in her small coterie of friends, admirers, and detractors. Campbell’s tale of an eccentric, independent woman living out her life in colonial Calcutta is set against a geographically accurate backdrop. It’s filled with wit, period detail, and literary references (like Delia’s name—a Shakespearean reference to Lear’s daughter banished for her independence). Her women are strong and eccentric; her men, delightfully Dickensian. The powerful writing style and clever characters are thoroughly enjoyable but can sometimes overshadow and confuse the storyline.
An elegant examination of the people and mores of a particular time and place in the history of the British Empire; perfect for anglophiles.Pub Date: May 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64271-122-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Okir Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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