A vivid, intimate collection of memories, ponderings, and portraits.
Darlington (The New Cocktail Hour, 2016, etc.) presents a collection of slice-of-life moments on a Chinatown bus.
This series of untitled, undated journallike prose poems was written, in part, on the titular “China Bus,” which travels between the Chinatowns of Philadelphia and New York City. Darlington evokes a milieu where riders smoke cigarettes, sob after too much alcohol, and debate the number of sexes beyond male and female. On the bus, the seats are constantly busted—and you’d best not touch underneath. “The China bus goes every hour between every city on the planet, and no one on it is quite alright,” Darlington writes. As one’s mind tends to do during commutes, the author’s train of thought wanders. He recounts running out of gas during a trip to the Yucatan, how “in the Himalayas…drivers pray to little plastic gods taped to their dashboards,” and a breakup in a fancy Chicago hotel room. Darlington’s missives reference sources as diverse as the tribes of the Great Plains to Sigmund Freud to the musical group The Handsome Family. His observations are quotidian but incisive; he wonders where a child found an ice cream cone so early in the morning, compares the fashion scenes in New York and Philadelphia, and studies sex workers like a sociologist: “We are all looking for a better situation than the one we find ourselves in. The hookers are better off than me financially, and they certainly have more clothes,” he writes. There’s a subtle yet authentic undercurrent of sadness to the daily weirdness that he experiences on his commute: “I wonder if any of the other travelers on the bus are like me. I have already died, and am a ghost traveling to New York to get a decent epitaph.” These stark passages serve as glimpses into others’ lives and feel complete even when as brief as a paragraph.
A vivid, intimate collection of memories, ponderings, and portraits.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-978139-61-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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