A highly pleasant collection of episodes set in a vanished Boston.
A debut volume of short stories evokes Boston in the 1980s.
Narrated by a Frenchman who—partly due to his outsider status—becomes a keen observer of Boston’s people and rhythms, the tales in this collection take a closer look at some of the daily happenings there that might otherwise be ignored. In one, he spends a winter evening people-watching through the window of the Dolce Momento Café, commenting on the acquaintances he sees hurry by. In another, he goes to Faneuil Hall to judge an ice sculpture competition—the works are all in the form of the Statue of Liberty—with his personal assistant and her 5-year-old son in tow. In a third, he visits Lowell, Massachusetts, during a yearlong celebration of the city’s favorite son, Jack Kerouac. “He could not understand why I liked Lowell,” writes Briottet of a friend who often worked in the city. “I told him that Lowell was one of a small number of cities that have a mystery—a hidden sense about them that is not apparent right away—and that you are drawn to them precisely for that reason.” Such incidental writings—more travelogue than literary fiction—make up the bulk of the book, originally in French. The author’s prose, as rendered by debut translator Boudrot, is leisurely and light: “It was easy for me to spot the people from Beacon Hill because they had certain mannerisms: they always walked at a certain pace, and dressed in a certain manner. They lived in the neighborhood, and the streets were familiar to them: strolling would mean they were not from Beacon Hill.” With its color and observations of class and atmosphere, the volume almost feels as though it were set in a time longer ago than the ’80s. The vignettes aren’t quite insightful or compelling enough to interest readers who don’t already have some attachment to Boston, but those who do will likely enjoy this low-stakes book featuring the narrator’s commentary and memories. Briottet achieves a magic that only visitors from another culture are usually capable of: He takes the familiar and, through his unjaded perspective, makes it seem exotic and remarkable.
A highly pleasant collection of episodes set in a vanished Boston.Pub Date: July 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-941416-21-1
Page Count: 146
Publisher: P.R.A. Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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