Not for the squeamish, but skillful, often elegant prose compensates for a disturbing tale about an American mission in...
Cyrenaica—once part of the nation of Tripoli—becomes the setting for a historical novel detailing the brutal 1805 trek through the Sahara Desert during the U.S.’s first foreign military action.
King Yusuf Vartoonian of Tripoli (now Libya) has captured 300 American mariners and is holding them for ransom. When Yusuf has 10 of them beheaded, President Thomas Jefferson is under pressure to show that his government can protect its citizens. A deal is struck between the U.S. and Yusuf’s older brother Prince Ahmad, who is the rightful heir to the throne. If Yusuf is overthrown and Ahmad given financial incentives, the Americans will be released. And so, fictional 19-year-old Pvt. Lemuel Sweet, the earnest, intelligent central protagonist, finds himself with a small group of Marines and a collection of Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, and assorted misfits of various nationalities trudging through the unforgiving terrain of the Sahara. Among the members of this disharmonious coalition is Gustav Ladendorf, a Swiss engineer and speaker of many languages. When the group’s Egyptian translator is found dead (with his body mutilated), Ladendorf steps into the role. The journey from Alexandria to Derna—to collect supporters of Ahmad—is marked by violence, death, and desperation, not to mention the presence of a diabolically sinister spirit (a djinn). As the march progresses, McCandless (Sour Lake, 2017, etc.) portrays Ladendorf as an increasingly enigmatic, malevolent character in this haunting, multilayered novel that explores the futility of war, good versus evil, and the dispiriting transformation of a man from youthful optimist to disillusioned soul. Told partly through present-tense, third-person narration and partly through Sweet’s lengthy, intermittent diary entries, this dark story with heavy supernatural overtones vividly depicts the heat, aridness, and mystery of the unending expanse of sand and emptiness that tortures body and mind. Here is Sweet describing the desert: “Great systems of Dunes have developed. They are restless creatures. They writhe and rear in the wind, constantly repositioning themselves, like sleepers troubled by Nightmares.”
Not for the squeamish, but skillful, often elegant prose compensates for a disturbing tale about an American mission in Africa.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-41572-6
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Ninth Planet
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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