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NP

Name: NP
Author: Banana Yoshimoto
ISBN: 0-8021-1545-4

by Banana Yoshimoto & translated by Michael Emmerich ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1994

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Japan's leading pop novelist follows her successful debut (Kitchen, 1993) with an ambitious novel of darker themes—incest, suicide, and the supernatural—that recalls more classic Japanese fiction. The narrator, a twentysomething translator named Kazami, was once the lover of the famous translator Shoji, who committed suicide shortly after completing his translation of the 98th story by the author of NP—the title of the volume of 97 short stories written by a middle-aged Japanese writer, Sarao Takase, who also committed suicide shortly after writing the 98th story. Since another translator of this story has also committed suicide, the story—about a father who abandons his family, leads a wild life, then seduces a woman who turns out to be his daughter—has acquired an understandably sinister reputation. Yoshimoto's novel begins as Kazami, troubled by mysterious intimations of danger and still mourning her dead love, meets up with Saki and Otochiko, adult children of NP's author. The three, who have much in common, including unhappy childhoods, become friends, and Saki and Kazami grow especially close. But then Kazami has a startling encounter with the enigmatic but very attractive Sui. Sui is also a daughter of NP's author—as well as the former mistress of translator Shoji- -and the real-life inspiration for the 98th story. Currently the lover of half-brother Otochiko, she is guilt-ridden and grieving to the point that she and Otochiko frequently discuss the possibility of a ``love suicide.'' But as the summer progresses, the four find ways—some dramatic, some banal—of expiating their feelings for the past and one another; and Kazami, a real survivor, now appreciates that ``everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.'' A contemporary, hip treatment of a potentially lurid plot makes for a read that nonetheless resonates with echoes of the past. Offbeat but sound. (First printing of 50,000)

Pub Date: March 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8021-1545-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PREMONITION
by Banana Yoshimoto ; translated by Asa Yoneda

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAD-END MEMORIES
by Banana Yoshimoto ; translated by Asa Yoneda

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAKE
by Banana Yoshimoto & translated by Michael Emmerich

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.