In Rindsberg’s debut collection, magical realism joins biblical resonance in seven stories populated largely by Israel’s underclass of beggars and madmen.
“There are many people in Tel Aviv.” Despite this unpromising first line, many of the stories that follow filter that unmanageable mass of citizens down to a handful of homeless outcasts. Four stories are told by an unnamed first-person narrator; like the flâneur protagonist common to W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole, this nameless character wanders the streets of Tel Aviv, reporting on his observations in “that city that looks like a smattering of barnacle spread across the bottom of a boat.” In “Spinoza Street,” he asks a homeless man for his history; the resulting story within a story—of falling in love with a country girl, living in a barn until he seems to become half-goat, taking over her father’s farm and marrying her—creatively blends Old Testament stories and pagan mythology. “White Hair Woman” has a Miss Havisham–like crone, “a witch of the streets, Tel Aviv’s silent sorceress,” holding court at the public library and awaiting messages from the lover who jilted her. Rindsberg’s metaphors are strikingly fresh, as in the witch’s “giant upward-dripping stalactite of hair” and “the old man and his steel-wool wife treated me like a burnt dish.” Of the remaining stories set among Tel Aviv’s street people, the best is “On Allenby,” one of only two third-person narratives. Two beggars, Shlomi and Mendel, compete for handouts until Rabbi Sirkin, visiting from America, invites them to the synagogue to illustrate his sermon on charity. The worshippers give a banquet in the men’s honor, provide them with new clothes and even offer them jobs so they can be self-sufficient—at which point they bolt back to their old lives. It succeeds as a humorous folk tale yet cannily exposes how religiosity is often just for show. The final, novella-length story, “Rivkah and Rebecca,” is another standout in which Aaron, a would-be writer, tells of his enduring love for twin sisters—one of them, it seems, now merely a spirit.
An inventive, empathetic set of character studies.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615422435
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Midnight Oil Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
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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