Irish writer Bennett’s third novel but first to appear here: a despairing but acute examination of a souring love affair and its ambiguous effect on certain nefarious characters pushing the Belgian Congo toward independence. Dour, alienated Irish novelist James Gillespie comes to the Belgian Congo in 1959 to renew affections with his Italian lover Inäs, an idealistic reporter for an Italian Communist journal who has been apart from him long enough for Gillespie to sense that there may be another taking his place. At first Gillespie is content to follow Inäs as she flits happily from boozy white-upperclass cocktail parties to the stinking, grimly impoverished black quarter of LÇopoldville. Careless of quotes, facts, on-site research and anything else that would jeopardize her one-sided reportage of Belgian exploitation, Inäs drifts ever closer to the camp of independence advocate Patrice Lumumba, the same man favored by easy-going American diplomatic attachÇ, Mark Stipe. Though Inäs warns Gillespie that Stipe is a CIA agent, Gillespie, after being flattered that Stipe may have actually read one of his novels, lets the agent feed him information that the novelist incorporates into a series of unnaturally prescient magazine articles about the independence movements. These bring Gillespie a small degree of money and fame, but they alienate Inäs, sending Gillespie into bouts of dark depression. She mocks him as a catastrophist(a person for whom every change is an absolute disaster) and takes up with Stipe’s African chauffeur, Auguste, a Lumumba supporter far wiser than he seems; then eventually, when Lumumba flirts with Communism, she dumps Stipe altogether. Gillespie beds the blasÇ wife of a Belgian industrialist, pines for Inäs, but finishes his novel—when Inäs appears suddenly on his doorstep asking that he help smuggle her, Auguste, and Lumumba out of the country. A relentlessly downbeat portrait of the artist as a whiney, self-pitying failure. Lightened with spicy sex scenes and absurdist accounts of colonialism at the edge of extinction.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86334-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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