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STILLNESS AND SHADOWS

Name: STILLNESS AND SHADOWS
Author: John Gardner
ISBN: 0394544021

by John Gardner ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 1986

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Novelist Nicholas Delbanco, Gardner's literary executor, has taken it upon himself to give to posthumous (and not intended to be published) Gardner manuscripts the pitiless light of day. Stillness, an autobiographical portrait, was, says Delbanco, undertaken by Gardner "as a process of therapy, as an exercise of recall engaged in with his wife." It's a picture of Gardner's first marriage: a whip-sharp woman, with nowhere special to put her natural talents, is married to a charismatic and rich but plodding novelist ("Very handsome. . .his prematurely silver hair flowing down his back. . .his English-Irish-Welsh voice singing through language . . .People wept, listening"). It is, in its mixture of vanity and complete self-absorption, a document of personal honesty—but to read it as anything approaching a novel is a little like giving a pool-maintenance contract to a narcissist. Gardner's insecurities and academic pomposities turn out to be the only really memorable elements. Did Delbanco do anyone a favor in bringing this to the public? The same tendentiousness obtains in Shadows—but here there's an alibi: it's an uncompleted work: about the Carbondale, Illinois, (one of the many places Gardner was an English teacher) detective, Gerald Craine, who's investigating a murder that enfolds him—and Gardner, all too gleefully—into long meditations on the paranormal, cognition and philosophical issues of consciousness. All intellectual fancy and very little else, it's a manuscript that Gardner himself seems not to have known what to do with. Yet the retrospective light it casts on the already published fiction is an interesting if not a happy one; the manuscript crystalizes Gardner's faults—pretentiousness, pedantry, contrariness, and shameless padding—and leaves you wondering if he was not a latter-day Thomas Wolfe. Delbanco's reconstruction brings up that question and also this one: with literary friends like this, do you need enemies?

Pub Date: May 12, 1986

ISBN: 0394544021

Page Count: 454

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON WRITERS AND WRITING
by John Gardner

- BOOK REVIEW
GILGAMESH
translated by John R. Maier & edited by John Gardner

- BOOK REVIEW
ON BECOMING A NOVELIST
by John Gardner

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.