“The poetry was in the climbing,” Froderberg writes, but the drama here is in the muddle humans make of their lives.
Froderberg (Old Border Road, 2010) lays on the spiritual symbolism in this novel set on a fictional mountain in India named for an actual Hindu goddess of knowledge, learning, art, and music.
Sarasvati Troy’s namesake mountain was first scaled the day of her birth in 1956. As Sara’s 25th birthday approaches in 1980, she and her father, a mountain-climbing philosophy professor, set out to scale Sarasvati with a hand-picked company of climbers: Professor Troy’s friend Dr. Arun Reddy and his son, Devin; Virgil Adams, who reached the summit during the 1956 expedition, and his wife, Hillary (a name with its own climbing associations); driven climber Wilder Carson and his wife, Vida, who teaches yoga. Also along, at least in spirit, is Sara’s mother, who died in a climbing accident when Sara was 7 but has remained a guiding presence in her daughter's life. Scaling Sarasvati demands grueling, sometimes literally impossible expenditures of spiritual and physical resources. Readers are drawn into the pain, danger, and mental exhaustion the characters face, but despite (or perhaps due to a surfeit of) lyrical prose, readers may also share the boredom—as similar scenarios are repeated, even the danger of avalanches becomes less compelling. So does Sara’s unearthly goodness despite her predictable romance with sensitive Devin. Fortunately, the other climbers are less perfect and therefore more interesting. When Hillary is injured and goes home before reaching base camp, Adams’ longing for her and their domestic comfort overwhelms his drive to climb. Long-time philanderer Reddy had a brief affair with Vida before his wife’s death, and sparks still fly between them despite Vida’s hope that Sarasvati will reignite her marriage with her seemingly oblivious husband. Coming across as a macho jerk, Wilder is secretly tortured by grief and guilt over the climbing accident that killed his twin brother.
“The poetry was in the climbing,” Froderberg writes, but the drama here is in the muddle humans make of their lives.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-21768-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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