Hits all the obvious notes while skirting the difficult passages, but should make a fun movie.
Brooklyn lawyer finds herself sharing mind and body with Franz Schubert, in this high-concept first novel already in film development (think Freaky Friday gone symphonic).
Thirty-one-year-old Liza Durbin is walking through Nordstrom while visiting her folks in California when she finds herself brilliantly playing Schubert on the store piano. Newly talented and with heightened senses in general, she gradually accepts that somehow Franz Schubert has entered her body. After a few episodes of peculiar behavior (when Franz takes over, she’s a little out of control), she takes a leave from her law firm to play piano under the guidance of a teacher from Juilliard who has mysteriously learned of Liza’s situation. Liza prepares for her Carnegie Hall debut at her platonic but heterosexual male best friend Fred’s apartment. Her rich sister Cassie promotes her into a media darling. Her boyfriend Patrick returns from an extended visit to Milan—where Liza fears he’s been unfaithful—and proves wonderfully sympathetic. Nevertheless, Liza allows herself a dangerous flirtation with a caddish composer who wants her to play his composition as her encore at Carnegie Hall. The concert is successful but controversial when she encores with a new Schubert piece instead. Eventually, the fact that Schubert is “within” her not only becomes public but is generally accepted. Patrick returns to Milan; she longs for him occasionally, but she’s awfully busy. Experiencing life through the filter of Franz’s genius, Liza loses weight, becomes glamorous as well as talented and wildly popular while remaining unaffected and lovable. On her European tour, Liza, guided by Franz, finds the conclusion to his unfinished symphony. Once the symphony is performed by an eclectic A-list orchestra (Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis) under Liza’s direction, Franz disappears into the ether, leaving Liza enriched and the world musically rejuvenated.
Hits all the obvious notes while skirting the difficult passages, but should make a fun movie.Pub Date: June 29, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6041-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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