At shorter length, Stead reveals more clearly her gifts in tone and voice and building a scene, while her theme here puts...
The four novellas of this reissued 1967 book center on young women in the 1940s and '50s seeking to find themselves in a world looking to impose its own definitions.
The enigmatic Honor Lawrence of the title story, age 15 but claiming 18, takes a job in a New York office but dislikes business and seems impossibly naïve until her father’s cruel behavior is revealed. She goes on “long inexplicable wanderings” and reappears in ever worsening condition to the man who hired her and whose wife speaks of how marriage can make a woman feel “like an imbecile in a little room, with no money and no freedom.” In “The Dianas,” Lydia is a vibrant American in the last days of a Paris vacation successfully fending off would-be dates and suitors. She escapes unscathed only to accept something seemingly fine that could be malign. Australian writer Stead, as she did painfully in The Man Who Loved Children (1940), lets a fairy-tale feel last only so long before shifting acutely. Bumptious, loutish men overshadow the two crucial females in “The Rightangled Creek.” One is a wife who does endless chores for her self-important writer husband and their coddled Princeton-bound boy. The other is a 22-year-old, “full of life,” who gets a disease from her guitar-playing do-nothing husband, loses a child and then her mind. “Girl from the Beach” returns to Paris, where Linda of New York has quit the Sorbonne and is surviving on occasional checks from her parents. She enchants a self-involved freelance writer and becomes embroiled in an exquisite comeuppance engineered by his latest ex-wife. Linda seems to bottle up her free spirit and return to an acceptable marriage in the U.S., but the fiance could harbor a threat.
At shorter length, Stead reveals more clearly her gifts in tone and voice and building a scene, while her theme here puts these fictions among the Ur-texts of feminism.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-925355-71-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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