Not even a last-minute death and the tension of ambiguities—what is Flaca’s real name? who is Soledad’s real father?—are...
A choppy debut from young activist and teacher Cruz attempts to record the Dominican experience in New York City.
Soledad returns to her family’s Washington Heights neighborhood from her downtown art-gallery job when her mother, Olivia, falls mysteriously ill. It’s this illness—Olivia’s already a “living ghost,” living in a state somewhere between depression and coma—that serves as the story’s apparatus of Dominican mysticism: the vehicle on which we will tour “Nueva Yol.” We meet Flaca, Soledad’s slutty teenaged sister, and Richie, a neighborhood tough, then follow the love triangle that ensues among them, the source of what little tension there is. A string of subplots and minor characters follow, including Ciego, the requisite wise blind man, and Toe-Knee, the token non-Dominican (he’s a black drug dealer), but none of them is particularly well-drawn, and there’s no real reason Soledad is the titular character. After things get moving, there’s also a parade of prostitutes and palm readers and magicians with their sauces and specialties, and though we’ve been assured that the ’hood is filled with hoods, Richie turns out to be a talented musician, Soledad an artist, Flaca an undiscovered prodigy, and Ciego an insightful anthropologist—self-taught, of course. This is the world where people literally say “Wassup?” to each other. It’s Do the Right Cosa, and sometimes Cruz’s bleeds into unnecessary Spanish, perhaps there to remind the gringos that folk from D.R. speak a different language, are more than banal: they’re a reminder that the story is ultimately addressed to an audience of blanquitos. The odd moment when Cruz seems to capture genuineness—a man cradles his spittoon in his lap, men play dominos on tables meant for chess—seem accidental in light of the fray of rote narrative choices.
Not even a last-minute death and the tension of ambiguities—what is Flaca’s real name? who is Soledad’s real father?—are enough to redeem this unambitious first effort.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1201-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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