The Acts of the Apostles meets The Satyricon—with surprisingly leaden results. Burgess' subject is the clash between the early Christians and Imperial Rome in the years between the resurrection of Christ and the destruction of Pompeii; but the pacing is as sluggish as it was in the gaudy but empty TV mini-series A.D. (also written by Burgess), of which this is essentially the novelization. Burgess' narrator is a retired Roman bureaucrat, equally skeptical about the claims of the Christians to eternal life and the claims of the Roman emperors to divinity. This detachment, which is undoubtedly the author's method for avoiding De Millean, non-Biblical sentimentality, nonetheless prevents the novel from ever catching fire—except in the literal sense, when Vesuvius erupts. In fact, the novel's one solid virtue may be its quirky learning—Burgess' conception of the relationship between Roman eros and Christian agape (spiritual love) is often fascinating. Beyond occasional nuggets of scholarship, however, such as the confusion of "Christus" (annointed) with "Chrestus" (cheerful, dutiful—a popular name for a slave, which led the Romans to assume that Christianity was a slave-cult), the novel offers little that rings true—especially in the area of characterization. Burgess' post-Augustan Romans are reminiscent—too reminiscent—of those in Graves' Claudius the God; and his Christians are either crudely stereotyped (doubting Thomas is rendered with a Scottish accent; Peter shudders every time he hears a cock crowing) or downright unpleasant (fanatical St. Paul is the major Christian character). All in all, Burgess has his eye on too many sources this time, some divine and some from pulpier realms—some Bulwer-Lytton here, some Suetonius there, then add a dash of Ben Hur (one central character is a Jewish radical who becomes a gladiator) and perhaps a touch of another mini-series, Masada. Repetition of central ideas and intercutting of Roman and Christian scenes technically pull the novel together, but, if learned, it's lifeless.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1985
ISBN: 0749006722
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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