Storywriter Huddle (Intimates, 1993, etc.) contributes an uncharacteristically stiff piece of work to Chronicle's novella series (see Beeman, above). Henry McKernan is with the NEA's ``American Music Recovery Program,'' so he's pleased when black jazzman Eddie Carnes, who's been living in Sweden and risking death by alcohol there, agrees to live in an NEA-subsidized apartment-cum-music studio near Washington, stay off booze, go out only when he's chauffeured, and let everything he plays be recorded for posterity if not also a career boost. The plan goes well for saxist Carnes, who at 61 enters a fertile period, and for project director McKernan, who declares Carnes ``a major American artist.'' The reader, though, fares less happily, chafing at McKernan's decidedly unhip narrative voice (``Live jazz so intoxicates me that I become happy, childish...''), but also at having to listen to his marital problems (by and large dismal). Bottom is hit when McKernan and wife Marianne listen to tapes made of Carnes's conversation while on a date (the agency keeps him body-wired at all times); it's hard to know whether the less credible thing is what's on these first- date tapesa painfully artificial exchange, over dinner, of first- awareness-of-sex memoriesor the fact that the McKernans actually find their path to the bedroom eased from listening to themeven after Marianne says approvingly of Carnes's dinner companion that `` `she's taken charge of her biological destiny. She's insisting on the value of intelligence and mutual personal inquiry and revelation as legitimate elements of courtship.' '' Huddle's way of dropping names into the storythe Marsalis brothers, for example, who stop in to jam with Carnesadds no psychological authenticity and just further muddies the question as to whether this weirdly stiff-necked tale might have begun life as a satire of federal bureaucrats and the National Endowment before losing its way. Gear-grinding work from an often fine story-crafter.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8118-1027-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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