Poet Louis debuts with a grim contemporary saga from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation (where he teaches at Oglala Lakota College): a story full of brutality and whimsy, though so volatile a mix requires a greater talent than is revealed here. Rudy Yellow Shirt, longtime Pine Ridge policeman, is having a midlife crisis of epic dimensions—one exacerbated by the extreme poverty and degradation among his Oglala people. He's hypertensive, impotent; his wife is ready to leave him; and his job of rounding up winos—among them his brother—and investigating an unending string of murders and fatal accidents gives him no peace. When he hits his head on a rock while chasing rape-and-murder suspects, however, his life begins to change. A mental presence he calls the Avenging Warrior commits him to bursts of vigilante justice, leading him to break the knees of the murderers with a baseball bat and later to burn down a liquor store adjoining the reservation. His sex drive returns, too, but since his wife is already gone, he chases other women, including his cousin's wife. The cousin then conveniently drops dead, leaving nothing between Rudy and his desire, although first he has to put feelings for his soon-to-be- ex-wife behind him—which he does by raping her. Meanwhile, this dubious progress toward domestic harmony is complicated by the decline of older brother Mogie, Vietnam vet and star athlete turned permanent drunk, whom Rudy accidentally set on fire along with the liquor store. Mogie soon walks the spirit road when his liver fails, but not before the brothers are reconciled: at the close, Rudy will put his vengeful nature to rest by fulfilling Mogie's last request—pouring a bucket of red paint down Washington's face on Mount Rushmore. Not a pretty picture of reservation life, but even so the shock effects from both the violence and the humor are severely diluted by tin-eared dialogue and trite phrasing.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-79958-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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