A depressing read, despite an ending that offers some triumph.
In Blanchard’s (Mourning Doves After the Fire, 2010) fantasy novel, a large rat colony is ruled by a good king until a rat soldier usurps power and the city hires exterminators.
“Life for the rats was always futile and wretched—an endless pursuit of something to eat.” That’s the case for even the best-run, safest refuges, such as the abandoned movie palace where Indio—a blind mole rat—has long ruled his huge colony. Most rats live only a few years but Indio is 30, giving him wisdom and experience in making rules, handling disputes, giving advice, and assigning punishments for sins such as shirking forage duties. Indio’s soldier rats provide enforcement; one is the high-ranking, ambitious Matthias. He dislikes Nicholas, Indio’s son and heir, and is determined to rule the colony himself someday, even though Hildegard, a fortuneteller rat, has warned him that he won’t live long. Matthias prepares an elaborate plan to surreptitiously eliminate the heir, which succeeds brilliantly; the unsuspecting Indio decides to make Matthias his new heir and guardian until Maxwell, his younger son, comes of age. Matthias repays his king by shoving him into an overflowing sewer, then taking over the colony and imposing draconian rules while ignoring duller responsibilities. He enjoys assigning punishments, though, including the most horrifying: being stuck to flypaper for three days. Soon the city goes to war against rats, giving the colony new survival challenges. Blanchard’s overcrowded animal colony ruled by an iron paw owes an obvious debt to the 1972 novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, to whom the book is dedicated. Like that author, he understands his characters as animals bound by their animal natures, which is a plus for the book as a whole. Blanchard has a harder task, though, because city rats just don’t have the inherent appeal of Watership Down’s wild rabbits: indeed, the huge colony is more than a little horrifying. The novel acknowledges this, but with scene after scene of brutal, bloody, meaningless deaths, Blanchard perhaps succeeds too well in illustrating the “futile and wretched” life of rats.
A depressing read, despite an ending that offers some triumph.Pub Date: May 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-4938-8
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
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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