Re-telling the story of Jesus is like re-inventing the wheel—it's Been Done, leaving a novelist merely the option of new alignments. This novel is based on Burgess' screen play for Zeffirelli's TV film, and considering the formidable hurdles, it's a somewhat strained but certainly consistent version. Burgess uses an anonymous, detached narrator who manages to bring the miracles and the teachings of Jesus—couched in a muscular idiom that sheds all mystic shadings—into a fairly comfortable balance. Some miracles are reported simply and briefly (the raising of Lazarus, the appearance of the angel at the Annunciation and Nativity); one is twisted into an amusing possibility (at the marriage at Cana, the Prophet extolls water as wine for the Good); and a few are left misty but not mystic (at the birth of Jesus: "There was the sound of music, whether of the heavenly host singing Holy, holy, holy or of drunken men in the tavern, I do not know. . ."). Jesus here is a man of powerful voice and body, "a man who could eat whole sheep and wrestle with lions," and along the way Burgess indulges in some rather playful innovations—Jesus is married briefly to a wife who dies; Jesus and John the Baptist, as boys, discuss their future. He also worries a variegated humanity from the supporting cast: Judas is a young vulnerable intellectual; Thomas is a Downstairs retainer; the Romans are cynically witty; the Zealots steely activists. His main thrift, however, is the portrait of Jesus as a good and brilliant man for whom the kingdom of heaven could be on earth: "Enter the house of death and you leave time behind. . . . You may even say that the kingdom is now, that heaven and hell are now." Make of this what you will theologically—call it liberal Protestant or radical Catholic—but Burgess deserves A for effort in an impossible assignment.
Pub Date: April 8, 1979
ISBN: 0553133187
Page Count: 308
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1979
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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