A satisfying tale about a German defendant and an American journalist; an impressive first novel.
A court proceeding in 1952 in South America deals with the long shadow of World War II.
In his debut historical novel, Bergengren gives readers two heroes, Michael Cohen and Johann Richter, and it takes over 400 pages before they can start to trust each other. The tale begins with Richter on trial (actually an extradition hearing) in La Negra, a fictional city high in the Andes. The hearing concerns the actions of the former German army officer during World War II, and even now, the British, the French, and the Israelis all want him. But what is he guilty of, if anything? Cohen, an American journalist, attends the hearing. He was caught in Germany before the war and lost his entire family in Dachau. Later, he would lose his great love, Rachel Stern, in the Israeli War of Independence. Richter saves his love, Elena Stein. (After Germany surrenders, they flee to South America and start a family.) Richter loathed Hitler and the Reich and was bent on assassinating him (after the infamous 1944 attempt failed) and curtailing the war. Years later, agents in MI6 are passing secrets to the Russians (remember Kim Philby and friends?), best represented here by the vile Anders Hardy, Richter’s long-time enemy. Things finally come to a boil in La Negra with MI6, the CIA, and Hardy’s rogues. The appropriate mayhem, set off by a kidnapping, ensues. All this may seem like a hopeless mishmash—many other characters appear in these pages—but Bergengren deftly pulls it off. The densely packed story, mixing the fictional with the historical, features effective pacing—the author takes his time—and solid prose. The flashbacks of Richter in the ’30s and ’40s (supposedly written later by the fictional Cohen), which neatly mesh with the main narrative, are often more gripping than the confrontations in 1952. And ironies abound. Richter is in fact a good German—his father was part of the 1944 plot—and he rescued a Jewish woman from a concentration camp. Cohen feels a “sense of connection” to the ex-officer (“As improbable as it seemed, his own life in some ways mirrored Richter’s”). The denouement ties things up nicely.
A satisfying tale about a German defendant and an American journalist; an impressive first novel.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-60190-7
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Stillwater River Publications
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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