A volume offers daft—and oftentimes deft—madcap short fiction.
A collection presents short stories depicting modern life in surreal terms.
Atkinson (The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, 2014) packs 23 stories, rarely beyond 10 pages in length, into this slim volume. In “Home Improvement,” a man discovers that his house, possibly feeling neglected, has just gotten up and left him; he stoically moves on in diminished circumstances, like any recently divorced man. In “Happy Trails,” a heartbroken, semiamnesiac guy who has evidently tried to commit suicide with a gun—and failed—tries to clean up the mess (including the brains blown out of his head) and keep up appearances. In “The Onion She Carried,” a businesswoman visits her refrigerator and determines it to be an “onion day”; everything thereafter is determined by and weighed against the vegetable she brings with her. In “The Unknowable Agenda of Ursines,” the first-person narrator encounters a talking bear in a gambling casino; the animal challenges him to a game of blackjack as a civilized way of working out a grudge. In the closer, “Up, Up, and No Way,” a guy granted the miraculous power to fly is also afflicted with a crippling angst that prevents him from actually staying airborne (“He had the power to fly, but not the ability. Every time he tried, the fear would pounce on him. The harder he tried to overcome it, the more crushing the fear became”). Most of the tales have been previously published in small literary journals. They consistently reflect an absurdist point of view of contemporary existence, where goofy and ridiculous events happen, often diametrically opposed to logic, just for the sake of causing trouble—yet in circumstances that seem oddly relatable. Sometimes the joke gets a little old even in the space of a slight word count (“An Account of the Great Toilet Paper War of 2012”). But generally one is reminded of the more satirical pieces by H.H. “Saki” Munro from a century ago, and that is good company indeed.
A volume offers daft—and oftentimes deft—madcap short fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942856-03-0
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Literary Wanderlust
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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