A fantasy tale with an ingenious and memorable premise.
In Riley’s (The Great Deflategate Conspiracy, 2015) novella, a 21st-century movie finds its way onto a theater screen in small-town 1950s New England.
Projectionist Shep Farrell and manager Leo D’Aleo are preparing for another mundane day of work at the Strand Theater in the all-white town of Enfield, Connecticut, when something extraordinary happens. As Shep is preparing to screen what he believes to be Creature from the Black Lagoon, the film mysteriously threads itself. The theater staff is astonished to discover, when the movie plays, that it’s unlike anything they’ve witnessed before—because it’s the 2018 superhero film Black Panther. Also alarming is the fact that the projector refuses to stop running even after Leo and Shep cut the power. In 1954, the film—which racist Leo describes as “a bunch of half naked Coloreds flying through space and shooting up white people”—causes a significant stir, and white crowds flock to the uncanny spectacle. Word soon reaches the White House; Vice President Richard Nixon attends a screening, and when he finds that the film can’t be stopped, he deems Black Panther a national security threat. The dialogue in Riley’s deeply imaginative novella vividly captures the politics of paranoia of 1950s America. For example, Nixon’s report to President Dwight Eisenhower states: “it appears to me as if [Marcus] Garvey directed this motion picture from the grave.” Meanwhile, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover accuses the “agitator Paul Robeson” of being behind the film simply because the performer once lived in Enfield. Riley also draws a damning caricature of the Eisenhower administration and the era’s casual racism. For instance, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles says that he’s alarmed by a Black Panther character’s “Africanized hair,” stating: “What are we to make of that Alfalfa hair-do?” The political figures are complex, conniving, and well-rounded, but Riley pays significantly less attention to his protagonist, Shep, who feels insufficiently fleshed out. However, this is a minor criticism of a daringly inventive novella that charts society’s ongoing struggle with racial bigotry and the role of cinema in challenging such prejudice.
A fantasy tale with an ingenious and memorable premise.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-941913-09-6
Page Count: 141
Publisher: The Nobby Works
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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