Love and Ordinary Creatures

Love and Ordinary Creatures
افزودن به بوکمارک اشتراک گذاری 0 دیدگاه کاربران 4 (1)

A Novel

مشارکت: عنوان و توضیح کوتاه هر کتاب را ترجمه کنید این ترجمه بعد از تایید با نام شما در سایت نمایش داده خواهد شد.
iran گزارش تخلف

فرمت کتاب

ebook

تاریخ انتشار

2014

نویسنده

Gwyn Hyman Rubio

شابک

9781618220332
  • اطلاعات
  • نقد و بررسی
  • دیدگاه کاربران
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نقد و بررسی

Publisher's Weekly

August 25, 2014
Packed with florid prose and a conspicuous attempt to illuminate the nature of love and the human condition, this novel by Hyman Rubio (Icy Sparks) falls flat. The protagonist,, a cockatoo named Caruso, is taken from Australia and ends up on the North Carolina coast, where he falls in love with Clarissa, his human caretaker. Conflicts include a rivalry with Clarissa's human love interest and a climactic hurricane. The story is often told second-hand to Caruso in the form of long, formal monologues, not just by one loquacious character but by every person the parrot meets. Although Rubio deserves credit for inventiveness, ultimately Caruso is unsympathetic, his view of love and of his owner as a female to be won and claimed having been shaped by a man who spent his entire life obsessing over unrequited love. As a reflection of humanity, Caruso is unconvincing, and, given the failure of the novel's blatant message there is not enough plot to hold the book together.



Kirkus

September 15, 2014
A self-consciously erudite cockatoo narrates this avian-human romance from Rubio (The Woodsman's Daughter, 2005, etc.). In 1993, cockatoo Caruso lives on Ocracoke Island on North Carolina's Outer Banks with Clarissa, a redheaded chef who whips up ambitious culinary delicacies while declaring her own favorite foods remain her beloved late grandmother's traditional Southern dishes. (Health-conscious readers may cringe at a chef who never seems to wash her hands and lets her bird loose in the kitchen.) Caruso became a domestic pet after he was kidnapped from his bird family in Australia years earlier. One smart cockatoo, Caruso is given to ruminating on man's narcissistic self-importance, following the teachings of the "Great Mother" and quoting Emily Dickinson. That appreciation of poetry came from Caruso's first owner, Theodore. A saintly romantic, Theodore retired from his career as headmaster of a boys school to move next door to the woman he'd silently loved since childhood despite her long marriage to a rich bully. Before entering a nursing home, Theodore introduced Caruso to concepts of love the bird carries with him as he faces a similar romantic crisis of his own. Caruso is in love with the giggly, annoyingly sweet Clarissa and basks in her attentive affection. Then Clarissa meets Joe, who has come to surf on Ocracoke while on summer break from studying environmental law. Clarissa's past boyfriends didn't threaten Caruso, but she seems serious about Joe. Plucking out his feathers in avian distress, Caruso begins plotting to win Clarissa back. Unfortunately, the cockatoo companion Clarissa finds to mollify Caruso only annoys him before fatally diving headlong into a pot of pasta sauce after a tantalizing feather Caruso has purposely dropped-a moment of unintentional comic relief in the slog through whimsy and New Age-y environmentalism. Worse, the cliche-ridden novel sends uncomfortable cues: Are readers really supposed to blame Clarissa's younger brother for being emotionally troubled or dislike her sous chef because he's effeminate?

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



Booklist

October 1, 2014
Caruso, an extraordinary creature in his own eyes and the narrator of Rubio's (The Woodman's Daughter, 2005) new novel, is a cockatoo. His ego is only surpassed by his passionate love for his owner, Clarissa, a chef on the North Carolina island of Ocracoke. His awareness of love comes from the memory of his parents in Australia before he was captured and the obsessions of his previous owner. Caruso does not just mimic sounds, he understands all that is said to him, processes it through his sensibilities, and acts accordingly, usually selfishly. All is perfect until Clarissa meets an attractive surfer/law student and her attention is divided. Caruso behaves like any jealous lover and does what he can to sabotage the relationship, nearly killing Clarissa in the process. A pending hurricane and the preparation process somehow bring him to a profound moment of self-realization and result in supra-human heroics. In this interesting cross-species love story, Rubio does a good job of expressing the mind-set of another creature and gives spot-on descriptions of the local landscape.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)




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