A terrifically energetic, modern update of Dante.
A law professor sets out on a philosophical quest, examining the nature of the afterlife.
This novel opens in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where professor Pete Herlinger has been in a coma for five years, since the car accident that wiped out his entire family in an instant. To the amazement of the hospital staff, he one day begins waking up, asking about his family—his parents, wife, and child were all in the car with him. His first heartbreaking realization is that they are all gone. He has no religious consolation: in fact, the conversation in the vehicle immediately prior to the crash heatedly revolved around the fact that, much to the outrage of his parents, Pete and his wife were raising their son to think God is basically a myth. After he wakes up, Pete finds himself in the unexpected position of yearning for any kind of afterlife in which his loved ones still survive. “Heaven is my family in the car before the crash,” he muses. “Heaven is my wife beside me, my son and parents in the back seat…enjoying their company, forever.” Ironically, given his previous state of nonbelief, Pete now embarks on “a good psychic freak-out,” visiting an afterlife like no religion has ever dared to imagine, a surreal, godless world where individual fantasies play out with endless abandon. His guide is his father, a transsexual now free to be—and appear as—a beautiful woman. The more Pete learns about this realm, the stranger it seems to him, especially with a mysterious figure known as the Commissar playing devil’s advocate. (“There is energy, there is dissipation,” he asserts. “There is nothing else.”) Author and Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Osborne (Blue Estate, 2014, etc.) conveys all of this with a thoroughly practiced hand. The characters stand out, the brisk pacing—particularly the comic beats—is spotlessly achieved, and the dialogue is crisp and compulsively readable. At one point, Pete and his father discuss the concept of reality. Dad: “For what it’s worth, a handy definition of Reality is precisely that which does not cease to exist when you stop believing in it.” Pete: “Philip K. Dick?” Dad: “Ah...so you’ve heard that one before.” Religious and atheist readers alike should find their certainties wonderfully upset.
A terrifically energetic, modern update of Dante.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9968613-2-8
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Lost Pilgrim Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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