An extraordinarily accomplished mix of the sensual and the cerebral in beautifully detailed settings by a writer of great...
The simple pleasures of the domestic arts well done become the stuff of metaphor in this wise and poignant tale of loss, both political and personal, by Sri Lankan born Gunesekera (short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994).
The narrator, Triton, is brought to work for Mister Salgado in 1962, “the year of the bungled coup,” by his uncle, who has arranged a new life for him because he is in trouble at home. The setting is Sri Lanka, a place that some think was the original Eden, and as the story begins, life is still sweet and mostly tranquil. Eager to please and learn, Triton soon becomes the perfect servant and cook for Salgado, an affluent gentleman and scholar who studies local marine life, coral reefs in particular. Triton polishes silver until “the pieces shone like molten sun”; makes superb cakes, curries, and even roasts and stuffs a Christmas turkey, preparing “each dish to reach the mind through every possible channel.” When Miss Nili, Salgado’s mistress, moves in, he is pleased to serve her, too. But soon the household, like the country, is beset with troubles: Miss Nili quarrels with Salgado and runs off with an American; the political unrest, once sporadic, is now pandemic; and Salgado’s best friend is murdered. Unable to forget Nili, Salgado, with Triton in tow, moves to Britain, where he has been offered a job. The two men are homesick, unable to return home as a Reign of Terror, a “suppurating ethnic war,” rages in Sri Lanka, but Triton, recalling a visit to one of Salgado ’s beautiful coral reefs “where everything was devouring its surroundings,” decides to make the best of it, and opens a restaurant. “It was the only way I could succeed: Without a past, without Ranjan Salgado standing by my side.”
An extraordinarily accomplished mix of the sensual and the cerebral in beautifully detailed settings by a writer of great promise.Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-219-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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