A little gem.
Delightful comic tale about a man who can’t convince anyone he’s who he says he is.
Recovered from a taxi accident that plunged him into a coma for three days, Martin Harris returns to his wife Liz. Entering the apartment they’re sharing in Paris, Harris encounters a man he has never seen who insists on being Martin Harris. Liz, his mate of ten years, also refuses to recognize the returning Martin, whose protestations become so intense the building super, who also doesn’t recognize Martin, ushers him from the premises. Author van Cauwelaert (the Prix Goncourt winner One-Way, not reviewed) thus starts with a premise that could serve a Hitchcock thriller, a Twilight Zone episode, or a heavy-going exercise in Existentialism. But van Cauwelaert nimbly sidesteps cliché and pretense, coming up with a series of sometimes dazzling scenes on the theme of identity. He speeds the hapless Martin through witty, touching, trenchant encounters with the hospital, the police, the woman driving the cab, and, a high point, a psychiatrist who offers Martin and the reader challenging but never heavy-handed theories about the powers of memory. Growing desperate for the most basic validation, Martin sets a private eye to spying on Martin’s neighbors for a shred of evidence that will prove he’s the real Martin. After checking birth, work, and marriage records, the p.i. tells Martin: “You don’t exist.” Martin’s hope now turns to the cab driver from the accident, Muriel Carderet, who comes to believe Martin is the genuine item. Indeed, as their relationship deepens, Martin wonders whether he might after all prefer being this new Martin. Then Carderet locates one of Martin’s former co-workers, who says he can vouch for Martin’s identity. The co-worker does unlock the puzzle, but not in a way one may expect. The swift final scene—a breathtaking jeté—should surprise even the most jaded fan of thrillers.
A little gem.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-59051-085-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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