A haunting take on the ills of flesh and soul.
An archaic world struggles with strange maladies in this darkly whimsical meditation on human discontents.
In a quasi-medieval land where science is still subordinate to church metaphysics, Senhor José, the monkish Head Librarian at the Central Library, introduces an apothecary named Máximo to the collection’s greatest treasure: the Encyclopaedia Medicinae. Perusing it, they discover short treatises on improbable ailments that combine physical disease with mental anguish, social antagonism and spiritual malaise. These include a reverse amnesia that causes everyone you know to forget who you are; a skin ulceration that expands with sinful behavior and shrinks with good deeds; a toxin that causes people to perceive the unbearable truth about the world; an infection that causes peasants and aristocrats to talk like each other; a hallucinatory fever that compels sufferers to create mediocre art; a collective ailment that causes groups of five people to share a single consciousness; and a syndrome that makes corpses return to life—a phenomenon that threatens “to topple the magnificent edifice of philosophy, art and literature” by undermining faith in the finality of death. Paralkar, a hematologist and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, sketches these mythical misfortunes in brief, elegant entries written as if by a physician-philosopher, setting out the preposterous specifics of symptoms, diagnoses and treatments beside mock scholarly debates over etiology and final ruminations on existential import. One school of thought characterizes membrum vestigiale, a wing growing out of the shoulder blade, as “a disease of truncated ambitions…of some yearning within man to escape limits nature places on him.” There’s no plot here and really nothing to this slight book except feuilletons, but Paralkar’s tragicomic imagination, sly sendup of pseudo-Latinate medical prose and fine sense of irony make for an arresting read.
A haunting take on the ills of flesh and soul.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941360026
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Lanternfish Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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