Frieze /

Gopal the carver tells of building the temple of Borobudur, the mighty monument to Buddha built in Java during the 10th century. PW called this a ``tour de force, a taut, highly compressed narrative of impressive power.'' (December) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Pineda's first novel, Face ( LJ 4/15/85), was nominated for the American Book Award. This second novel is shaped into 120 brief chapters, giving the reader an experience parallel to that of the narrator, Gopal. Gopal is enslaved and set to work carving 120 panels in stone, each depicting a scene from the life of Buddha, to be mounted in the great temple of Borobudur in central Java. As he completes this lifelong task, his two wives disappear, depriving him of his inspiration, and he sacrifices himself to his art in an astonishing act of purification. The novel, whose tone and structure mirror the floating, dreamlike quality of Gopal's emotions and artistry, is a serious inquiry into the nature of artistic ability and expression by a remarkable writer. Recommended for libraries supporting the study of creative writing or the fine arts, as well as large fiction collections. Susan E. Parker, Harvard Law Sch . Lib., Cambridge, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From the author of Face (American Book Award nominee in 1985) comes a small, impressionistic, and aesthetically precise second novel about the construction of the great shrine of Borobudur, in Java, in the ninth century A.D. Gopal is a stone carver who is pressed into the service of ""the new kings, the Sanjayas""--the Javanese leaders who, by tyrannically impressing all the labor and talent of their subjects into the raising of the great shrine, will leave behind only the completed monument itself--and the penury, exhaustion, and starvation of a vanished kingdom. Gopal himself labors on the project for 20 years, remembering all the while his beloved wife Maya, who was driven into madness when her first child--a girl--was taken from her and left to die. Maya remains the inspiration for much of the beauty Gopal captures in stone as he continues to sculpt, half ignoring the growing repression, turmoil, and famine around him. He ""inherits"" the wife of his good apprentice, Karto (Karto's family has no food for her), and it is she who comes to replace the aging Gopal's lost wife, Maya: when Gopal, having finished his great frieze, is blinded by the fanatic Sanjayas (""Because such perfection must not ever be repeated""), she serves as his ""eyes,"" enabling him to go on carving, in however limited a way. The novel advances in small, one-or two-page chapters, almost like the careful strokes of the stone carver's chisel, achieving its effect often by indirection. But the effect is indisputable, both in the book's harmony overall, and in its moments of terrible pathos--as in Maya's first grief, Gopal's blinding, or his inherited wife's forced abortion, due to her punishment for her having displeased the kings. Sometimes difficult, but expertly accomplished, and sustained movingly by the high metaphors of human desire and political cruelty. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.