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ACROSS THE LAKES

Name: ACROSS THE LAKES
Author: Amal Chatterjee
ISBN: 1-861590-52-0

by Amal Chatterjee ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1999

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A first novel by a Sri Lankan-born, Indian-educated writer now living in Scotland begins with much promise, but loses steam as obvious, plot-driven events rush an abrupt resolution. The story opens at a fashionable Calcutta lakeside rowing club where Putul sits drinking; he’s been in Scotland for three years working on his doctorate and thinks he’s entitled to some leisure before joining his uncle’s business. It’s at the club that he runs into the second protagonist, Meena, a distant cousin and young poet who is also just back from Scotland. The third is Choto, the only son of Meena’s family servant, who would rather drink with his buddies than take the jobs his mother finds for him. Finally, there’s John, a young Scottish friend of Putul’s who comes to India to find his family’s roots. All four are impressively delineated, the settings vivid, and the storyline—until it speeds up to reach the finish—current and credible. Choto, hoping to please his mother, starts driving a decrepit cab. Meanwhile, Meena, caught up in her family’s attempts to find a wife for her brother Dada, falls in love with Ranjan, whose sister might marry Dada. Thus far, the leisurely narrative seems to be setting readers up for a long, satisfying tale. The pace changes, though, when John gets into the cab driven by Choto, who has recently given a ride to a group of political agitators. Both men are killed when the car goes off the road and explodes; rumors abound that the accident was caused by a faulty part manufactured by a company with political connections. There are no happy endings for Meena and Putul either: the marriage of Meena’s brother to another woman ends her relationship with Ranjan, and Putul, shocked by John’s death, decides to leave India. All of these developments appear forced, a means to quickly finishing off a story whose characters deserve greater care and exposition. One of those rare novels where more would be better than less.

Pub Date: May 15, 1999

ISBN: 1-861590-52-0

Page Count: 246

Publisher: Phoenix/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.