So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, and fangs for nothing.
Yet another favorite thing gets the vampire-meets-classic mashup treatment.
What do you do with a problem like The Sound of Music? Time has made the irrepressibly catchy Rodgers and Hammerstein tale of a family singing down Nazi oppression ever more sappy and out-of-touch. So while the musical is fair game for parody, Goldsher (Paul Is Undead, 2010, etc.) attacks it with all the subtlety and violence of a chain saw. Tracking the plot of the 1959 film version, Goldsher dutifully makes each scene bloodier and bawdier, if not necessarily funnier. Here, beloved governess Maria, possessed of a pair of fangs and an out-of-control libido, departs Zombie Abbey to manage the overflowing von Trapp household, where dad is a vomit-prone alcoholic, Leisl is ripe for seduction (she’s 16 going on 17, after all), Baroness Elsa is a succubus and Nazi Undeath Squads attempt to chase down the von Trapp children after Maria turns them all into vampires. Goldsher’s humor tends to trawl every gutter (daughter Marta is renamed Farta, for instance). But sometimes he drags things a step or two above the curb. The “Do-Re-Mi” routine cleverly references acid rain and “a dead deer that’s ready to be eaten,” characters routinely break down the fourth wall by referencing the musical they inhabit, and interludes feature other fictional vampires (Sesame Street’s Count von Count and Twilight’s Edward), delivering knowing commentary on genre conventions. There’s a cameo from John Coltrane, who elevated “My Favorite Things” from a Broadway showstopper to sublime art; alas, it only prompts Goldsher to move in the opposite direction, with Maria dubbing Coltrane “Chocolate Thunder.” Goldsher is narrowly obsessed with making every scene either a romp of PG-13 double-entendres or a blood bath.
So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, and fangs for nothing.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64020-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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