Insufficient plot here, and the argument is overinsistent and oppressive.
A skimpy narrative and redundant emphases on the burdens and mysteries of Judaism drain the life out of Skibell’s initially promising second (after A Blessing on the Moon, 1997).
The story begins smartly, in the American Southwest, where academic and musicologist Charles Belski is dragged into vacationing by his very blond and Waspish wife Isabelle. Charles, who narrates, is a petulant perfectionist whose morose wit—compounded of his culture’s and his family’s generational sufferings, and also his own innate fatalism—often makes him sound like Humbert Humbert inveighing against American trash culture. He’s “a typical male epithalamiophobe” nevertheless essentially happily married; a reluctant father; and a theoretical atheist who logically asserts that “one needn’t believe in God in order to feel abandoned by Him.” As long as Skibell is winging it back and forth between Charles’s state of suspended bilious animation and flashbacks showing us how he got to be that way, The English Disease (which malady, incidentally, is reputedly melancholy) is enormously winning. Then Charles travels to Krakow to attend a Wagner conference, thence to the Auschwitz Museum, accompanied by his obese, stentorian colleague Leibowitz—and the novel devolves into a series of declamations and meditations on anti-Semitism, the ordeal of the European Jews, and the absurdity of embracing ideologies. Skibell tries to keep it moving, but the poisonously gregarious Leibowitz bores us almost as much as he annoys Belski, and things grow awfully static. Skibell recovers somewhat by returning Charles to the terrors of domesticity, and concludes with an interesting (if overlong) account of the energetic, ever suggestible Isabelle’s passionate conversion. It’s a shame she wasn’t around in Poland, for Isabelle is easily the most engaging character here.
Insufficient plot here, and the argument is overinsistent and oppressive.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-257-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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