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KRAKÓW MELT

Name: KRAKÓW MELT
Author: Daniel Allen Cox
ISBN: 978-1-55152-372-9

by Daniel Allen Cox ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2010

Ironically, this brief novel takes on too much: Cox knows his way around Polish fairy tales, soccer culture, Czeslaw...

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A gay, parkour-loving pyromaniac takes a stand against Poland’s oppressive society.

Radek Tomaszewski, the narrator of the second novel by Cox (Shuck, 2008), is an artist with a peculiar specialty. He constructs scale models of major cities consumed by fires—Chicago circa the Great Fire of 1871, San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake—with the intent to burn them before gallery crowds. But with the help of Dorota, an art student, he learns to broaden his artistic and emotional horizons. Unified in their contempt for Polish homophobia, they perform stunts like using candles to spell out gay-positive slogans and participate in rallies supporting an apparently homosexual elephant at a zoo. Cox ups the absurdist quotient by making Radek an enthusiast for both Pink Floyd and parkour, a discipline that treats cities like obstacle courses. But aside from random character coloring, it’s not entirely clear how those enthusiasms serve the story; the novel’s brief chapters leap from one set piece to the next, hanging only to a thin thread of plot. That’s not a problem when particular passages are successful. One powerful, sensual chapter about a beach trip shows how difficult it is for gays to express themselves in public without fear. In another chapter, a gay doctor performs emergency surgery on an ailing Pope John Paul II (the novel is set shortly before his death in 2005), while pondering the Catholic Church’s homophobia—a scene that will gain added resonance in the book’s final pages. But such moments don’t compensate for the narrative’s lack of connective tissue, which might have made Radek and Dorota’s struggles feel less abstracted.

Ironically, this brief novel takes on too much: Cox knows his way around Polish fairy tales, soccer culture, Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry and life in Kraków, but his treatment of these is too glancing to have the intended emotional impact.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-55152-372-9

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

Review Posted Online: July 28, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010

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

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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.