``The late afternoon is my bad time, when the light goes. I get nervous then, and long for someone to come.'' Fay Langdon is looking back on a life of emotional desolation, in Brookner's most powerful novel yet. Fay's story is in essence a simple one: an attractive, talented, self-supporting but unworldly young woman, with a trusting heart formed by a loving home, marries the man of her dreams, and is never happy again. The place is London and the time the late 1940's. Fay's fine singing voice gets her work on the radio, but on marrying lawyer Owen Langdon she agrees to abandon her career and become a housewife and hostess at dinner- parties for Owen's rich clients. At one of these she meets Julia, wife of Owen's senior partner Charlie, and a former cabaret star, now dependent for an audience on a small circle of adoring women (this is Julia's story, too). By now Fay has realized she has married a man terrified of intimacy; money and social connection are the touchstones in a coldhearted world of pretense. Nor is Julia's circle, to which Fay has been admitted, any kind of refuge, for the actress is a creature of infinite malice, who delights in tormenting her coterie; only Fay's weak sense of self keeps her in thrall. Owen dies in middle age; Fay becomes Charlie's mistress, though hating the deception involved. ``Life had taught me to seek protection, however nugatory.'' Charlie, however, can no more manage intimacy than Owen; then he too dies. And still Fay cannot break free from the monstrous Julia, who wrecks her last chance of male companionship; as old age set in, Fay tries desperately to preserve a facade of dignity. Brookner's portrait of a woman adrift in a comfortless world, where the hourglass never stops running, chills to the bone: it is as harrowing, and as unsparing, as the work of the great Jean Rhys.
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58548-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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