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MUSCA DOMESTICA

Name: MUSCA DOMESTICA
Author: Christine Hume
ISBN: 0-8070-6859-4

by Christine Hume ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2000

An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.

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The Barnard New Women Poets Prize was awarded to this first collection of enormously imaginative poems written by the winner of a recent fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center and a grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts. From the deceptively simple title (musca domestica is Latin for housefly) to the poems focusing on such philosophically sophisticated subjects as the meaning of meaning, everyday life is presented as we rarely consider it—skewed and in language and syntax designed to please linguists more than ordinary readers. Hume’s titles intrigue: “Lies Concerning Speed,” “Map Drawn from Memory by My Brother,” “Total Things Known about Motion,” “A Million Futures of Late.” At the same time, the poems themselves are puzzles, the best of them in the simultaneous spirits of Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings (“Didn’t you see it sky the sum?”), the least simply confusing, as if the speaker were caught in a world in which all images were surreal (“I shuffle layers of pulp / feathering gossip”) and most syntax was arranged as if to duplicate that of a foreign tongue. Some poems contain striking, meaningful ideas or images (“Because the unadorned always subject the adorned to their proofs”; “from a rock jetty / five monks ease their hems / into the river”), but a reader must wade through too much weedy language to reach these few brilliances. In one of the collection’s most successful poems, “Articulate Initials,” Hume fantasizes actual lives within the illustrations surrounding illuminated letters. Here her description remains singularly focused, with the fine result that she reaches unexpected but earned epiphanic conclusions. Too many poems in the book offer only dispersed images and so many of them per poem that any luminosity is diluted.

An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.

Pub Date: April 21, 2000

ISBN: 0-8070-6859-4

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.