Nine rather commonplace tales, most of them previously published in literary magazines, try on a couple of different voices but share a focus on loyalty, sexual and otherwise, and adultery. Albarelli's male narrators can't control their own animal urges; little else seems to explain their need to be unfaithful. A few of these lackluster pieces even take place in that hotbed of infidelity, the college campus. ``Infatuated'' pokes fun at its narrator, a visiting professor who develops a mild obsession with one of his sexy students at an all-girls' college in Virginia—she turns him down before he has a chance to betray his longtime lover back in New York. Nonsexual loyalty is at the center of stories about fraternal twins, one of whom embraces Orthodox Judaism; and of ``Honeymoon,'' in which a young IRA member must choose between his new bride and his devotion to the cause. The narrator of ``Winterlude'' is the only male in this bunch who endures a wife's betrayal, a dramatic bit of cuckoldry that sends him spiralling downward. The other cheaters are treated somewhat more heavy- handedly. In the dull ``Passenger,'' a young ferry captain, married in his teens, takes up with an older woman, a relationship that promises only uncertainty. The philanderer in the title story, a local private investigator who's betrayed his wife in the past, works a case following a man's wife who turns out to be cheating on him with the p.i.'s former girlfriend. In ``Grace,'' the husband must cope with the fact that his wife was raped while he was out playing around. And in the best piece, ``Flame,'' a young rocker who lives in the shadow of his older brother is happy to catch him on the couch with a woman, thereby betraying a higher loyalty, his Roman Catholic priesthood. Religion and ethnicity give some dimension to otherwise boilerplate narratives—a competent but unexciting debut.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14294-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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