Lust proves the catalyst that reconnects a hotshot insurance salesman with his buried Indian past, and with a spirit guide he'd prefer to avoid: a fast-paced and funny, if somewhat fragmented, follow-up to Moore's Practical Demonkeeping (1992). Sam Hunter, formerly Samson Hunts Alone of the Crow reservation in Montana, left home in a hurry as a teenager after throwing a cop over a dam, established himself successfully in L.A. as an unflappably congenial insurance hustler, only to have his past catch up with him 20 years later when he stops to gawk at a gorgeous, leggy blond on his way to an appointment. A mysterious Indian appears in his life at the same time, and within 24 hours Sam has lost his job, his condo, and his equilibrium. The blond, Calliope, leaves him hopelessly in love after a first date, while the Indian, by changing into a coyote, a raven, a mosquito, and other shapes, is revealed as none other than the Trickster, Old Man Coyote of Indian legend. Having appeared to Sam as a boy on his first vision-quest, Coyote now wants to put the grown man's successful but empty life in order, but when Sam begs for a return to normalcy, Coyote complies—and Calliope vanishes. The two follow her to Las Vegas, where Coyote gambles away all of Sam's money and his car, but they team up with her in traveling to South Dakota to rescue her son, abducted by her crazed biker ex-husband. In a getaway with the boy, Calliope is killed—but when Coyote later makes the ultimate sacrifice in Crow Country, she magically revives for the sappiest of happy endings. Lively and loopy, and certainly imaginative, but the conventional underpinnings offer little support for frequent flights of fantasy, yielding an entertaining but hollow romantic adventure. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-88188-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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