What little ``medicine'' is available in this debut collection is not only painful for the embattled characters, but it throws into painful relief the displaced moods and passions of the gay psyche as it confronts the end of the century. In a severe, disciplined, brooding style that presses each of his six stories toward a harsh and elliptical conclusion, Klein (1979 winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize) details the struggles of his small tribe of loosely tethered charactersmost of them starved for some kind of emotional fix. ``Club Feet'' establishes the basic tenor: Each of the gay men who functions as a pivot for an individual narrative will suffer a physical malady either altering his self-image or threatening his life. In ``Club Feet,'' the narrator finds in his deformed foot an inescapable connection with his similarly disabled mother. In ``Undertow,'' an adolescent infatuation with a straight relative leads to rape and victimization, with detours through theft and voyeurism. The title story explores Klein's central obsession, the rending tension that links beauty and ugliness: Scarred by cystic acne, the narrator nonetheless manages to devise an attitude toward his malady that lets him function both as foil to and confidant of Lawrence, a striking painter with a troubling taste for older men. ``Keloid'' and ``Dr. K.'' are weaker tales, though explicitly addressing the lurking specter of AIDS, for which the only medicine is hope. The last piece, ``India,'' summarizes in novella form the plangent chiaroscuro that characterizes the author's style: After his lover's death, the narrator, himself stricken with AIDS, takes a feverish trip to India and wanders among an unlikely gaggle of locals and expatriates, allowing the rich experience of travel in a strange land to shape his final days. Harrowing, and yet exquisite, unflinching, and compelling. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 24, 1995
ISBN: 1-85242-403-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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