A diverse collection of rich and eloquent tales.
These short stories of awkward relationships and crossed destinies take readers to such unusual locations as post-Soviet Russia, the Juilliard School campus, and a state-of-the-art penitentiary.
DePew’s (The Melancholy of Departure, 2013, etc.) collection takes its name from a song in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which features prominently in the title story. In it, a theater company ventures into Russia shortly after the fall of communism, and they must contend with the shaky environment and its foreboding politics. At the story’s center, Arthur and Irene are close friends and confidants, but their inexplicably platonic relationship becomes strained as uncertainties mount. As they try to explain their artsy gibberish to the cynical Russians they meet, the Western thespians echo the stories’ major motif of artists in crisis. In each of the narratives, a creative professional attempts to reconcile artistic endeavors with the confusion of ordinary life. In “Blind,” Jacob and Miranda are musicians who can’t get their marriage to harmonize; Jacob is too stiff and literal to keep Miranda’s attention, so she prefers the company of a dramatic gossip named Frank. Each story happens in a unique place and time, and the characters endure a variety of burdens, but in each, their desire to be artists is hindered by painful contact with other people. The protagonist of “La Casita,” for example, is a painter who declares, “I have to confess that I’ve sacrificed the sacraments for pigment and linseed oil and scratching away at a surface all day.” The sentiment is beautiful—but then he adds: “And for this I’ve been sent a particular torture: postmodernism.” DePew’s patiently told and beautifully crafted stories are lengthy; three are so long they might be classified as novellas. However, that fact gives the author the space he needs to build two worlds—the artists’ inner lives and the daily existences they struggle with. Overall, they reveal both the turmoil of creativity and the meandering beauty of ordinary human interaction.
A diverse collection of rich and eloquent tales.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990768005
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mixed Messages Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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