A strange, gawky dance between the past and the present, and between mundanity and insanity.
Two Irish brothers compete bitterly for the affections of a beautiful eco-terrorist.
Crude, self-entitled petty criminal Liam Caffrey needs a woman to complete his image of himself as a success. He sets his sights on Nuala Macree, who returned from Spain to their hometown of Lochard as a single mom to help an activist group save the town’s lake from a French water conglomerate. Liam’s socially naïve, intellectual brother Mel, whose recent spiritual crisis has led him to leave the monastery for home, has also latched on to Nuala as the radiant goddess who will fill the space that God has left. The brothers’ ineffective desperation, increasingly insane thoughts and bizarre behaviors in pursuit of Nuala, as well as the extreme antagonism they have toward each other, are described from inside their emotional spaces, caricatures standing in stark relief to Nuala’s graceful, noncommittal responses. Parkinson provides strange juxtapositions in this debut novel. There’s a voice and depiction of a traditional small town, as well as a working-class Irish life, that could easily be mistaken for something written in the 19th century, but certain details reveal a modern setting, like terrorism that consists of destroying electronic files or a party band that plays "Tainted Love." By the climax of the book, Liam’s move to impress Nuala with an open house party in his newly remodeled home leads to a surreal physical confrontation between the brothers, and the focus on the psychology of the obsessed pair suddenly expands into a broad, chaotic explosion of the whole small town’s anger and erotic energy in which even the lake itself gets a voice. The writing is overall a bit stilted and ungraceful, as if it is fighting with itself about whether it is philosophy or theater, pathos or satire. But in a way, this awkwardness suits the subject matter, and it’s unclear if this is literary defect or just unusual styling.
A strange, gawky dance between the past and the present, and between mundanity and insanity.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983859611
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Cool Root Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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