Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly.
From Italy’s prize-winning Baricco (City, 2002; Ocean Sea, 1999, etc.), a thinny-thin little tale that stretches credibility but takes up big imponderables.
After a war that’s unnamed but sounds like WWII, three men come to a remote farmhouse somewhere in Italy to slay another man: Manuel Roca, an erstwhile medical doctor from the losing side in the war, whose hospital, according to those now coming to kill him, was a Dr. Mengele–like place of torture and despair such that patients asked only for death (which one of the three men now present indeed gave to his own agonized brother when he found him in that hospital). The atrocities of Manuel Roca are hearsay to the reader, though the atrocities visited upon him are not, as he is first tortured and then killed, as his preteen son is machine-gunned into bits—and as his young daughter listens to all from a root cellar under the floor. The boy-monster, Tito, who does the machine-gunning, is also the one who opens the cellar and sees the girl lying down below—and spares her, if only because the other two killers don’t hear him shout that she’s there. So much for the book’s first half. In the second, an aging woman—the girl of the cellar—walks in a city, comes upon a man selling lottery tickets from inside a booth, begs him to close up shop and come with her to a café—where she reveals that she’s the girl he spared and that she knows he’s the killer Tito who, albeit by accident, let her live. The two talk, weep, reconstruct the events between then and now, events that include the apparent fact of the woman’s having tracked down the other two of the three killers and killed them in revenge. And so what does she have in mind, now, for the lost, aged, and haunted-by-the-past Tito?
Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4145-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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