The many different elements in this novel—including environmentalists, dowsing, and family loyalty—converge in a smooth and natural flow. Narrator Scottie—who notes that his childhood nickname has stuck long past appropriateness—is an attorney who lives in Landaff, Vt., with his wife, Laura, whose family is known for being strange, and for being able to locate water. Laura's confrontational sister, Patience, has particularly strong abilities and has also located oil, lost children, and missing valuables. Scottie and Laura have a young daughter, Miranda, who appears to be developing as quite a dowser as well, and Patience is eager, perhaps too eager, to take over her education. Scottie is representing a ski resort called Powder Peak in its bid for expansion, a project which has brought him into opposition with a local environmentalist state senator, who also happens to be engaged to Patience. This family connection might seem too facile, but Bohjalian does an impressive job painting Landaff as ``the sort of town where everyone is indeed related to everyone, and the town meeting that occurs on the first Tuesday of every March is as much a family reunion as it is an exercise in legislative self- determination.'' In the past, Bohjalian (Past the Bleachers, 1992, etc.) has faltered on plot points, relying on clichÇ to bring things together, but here his tempered voice finds its narrative niche, whether describing the peaceful setting with rumblings of discontent just under the surface, the circus-like arena of environmental politics (those opposing expansion form a group called ``Citizens Opposed to the Powder Peak Environmental Rape''), or Scottie's own internal struggles. Subtlety is key. When Scottie and fourth-grader Miranda spot catamounts on the mountain, he knows that expansion must be stopped and abruptly switches sides. Bohjalian slips in information about catamounts, dowsing, Y rods and the like without ever sounding preachy or falling out of Scottie's cohesive voice. Buoyant and brilliant.
Pub Date: March 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-87451-687-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
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