A promising first effort, deliciously creepy and often moving.
This cohesive debut collection of seven stories, most taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area, revolves around the notion of rescue.
When nature is out of whack, humankind tends to pay the price. In these stories, as toxic landscapes pose a threat to individuals and communities, several characters undergo grotesque transformations or enter virtually catatonic states. In “Wawona,” a teenage girl unable to move after a surfing accident finds herself stuck in the back of her panicked boyfriend’s truck. Another predominant motif centers on water in a variety of forms: ocean, reservoir, rain, mist, fog; in Brunicardi’s narratives, this normally life-giving substance becomes volatile and dangerous. The title character of “The Quickening of Ethan Boyd” comes into contact with a contaminated stream and slowly slips into an altered state of being. In the final lines, a touching farewell to his beloved wife takes a bizarre turn and suggests a bloody, chaotic aftermath: “My sulfurous teeth await your soft shoulder.” In a compact space, the author constructs well-paced narratives with adequate character development and mounting suspense. For instance, descriptions of the elderly couple under siege in “Mountainous”—“Gordon looked at his wife of forty one years. She seemed so small and frail standing there in the middle of the room, like a frightened animal”—give readers a clear sense of the lifetime they have spent together and the sacrifices each partner is willing to make for the other as they confront demons. Not all of these tales rely upon fantastical elements to pack a punch. The most realistic story, “The Seeds of Antipathy,” is perhaps the hardest hitting. When his young son nearly drowns, Blake decides to face a tragic event from his past that he has unsuccessfully tried to forget. Boarding a plane, “He began to doze and was immediately awakened by the gliss of a pearly clarinet as the airline’s adopted theme song was piped into the cabin.” In one of the book’s most haunting images, a clarinet case eerily floats on the water’s deceptively calm surface.
A promising first effort, deliciously creepy and often moving.Pub Date: June 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1600478727
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Wasteland Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
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