Issues of faith and will are at the center of this meditative tale set in London, New York, and Moscow—a striking work in the author's signature style. Tall, dark Claire is a lapsed Catholic and survivor of her husband's suicide. Somehow she is not surprised when, while she's off with her lover for a weekend in the English countryside, her 16-year-old daughter back in London is raped. Claire tries to atone for her neglect by cutting off her own personal life in service of her daughter, Rachel; when the girl learns she is pregnant and decides to keep the child, Claire quietly arranges for a leave of absence from school, sets aside her own academic research on the works of a minor (and suicidal) Italian Renaissance artist, and devotes herself to instilling in her broken daughter the will to go on. Meanwhile, in New York, a melancholy young editor of art books, caught in a meaningless affair with a willful young Englishwoman and grieving over the suicide of his soulful Russian-American cousin, seeks distraction in an unexpected transfer to London. There he meets Claire and Rachel and, sensing that his vague but urgent search for meaning melds uniquely with theirs, agrees to go with them to Russia to seek out a long-lost painting of the Annunciation by Claire's Italian artist. Carefully as the protagonists plan their journey, events in chaotic Russia soon overwhelm them—until the sight of the painting, which takes place in near-miraculous circumstances, offers solutions to their lives they that never could have reached on their own. Plante's (The Accident, 1991, etc.) characters may be mere ciphers for the more multidimensional philosophical issues he seeks to explore—guilt and redemption, faith versus rationalism, will versus despair—but his ruminations remain so stimulating that a certain lack of credibility is beside the point. Excellent intellectual escapism, and classic Plante.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-68091-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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