Guru Chopra's (Ageless Body/Timeless Mind, 1993, etc.) first novel comes up with a mind/body version of the Arthurian legend that lends great charm to familiar lore. Chopra not only creates strong prose for his lighter-than-air battle between magical forces of good and evil but keeps the pot boiling with symbols that bounce meanings off the page and a plot that turns inside out like a glove as characters shift shapes and identities. The novel opens on the fall of the Round Table to Arthur's evil son, Modred, while introducing us to a Merlin seemingly bored with destiny, then leaps to modern times as Detective Constable Arthur Callum investigates the highway death of a bearded old man (Merlin), whose body disappears from an ambulance. Arthur is assisted by Detective Constable Katy Kilbride (who echoes Guinevere), but neither of these modern folk is bound by the rules of courtly love that brace Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. The enchantments and evil spells common to knighthood, though, do leap the centuries, as Modred in modern guise seeks out the new Merlin to destroy his power for good. Why did the earlier Merlin seem bored? Because wizards live backward through time—and know outcomes before they know beginnings. The story never takes on epic scale, but in minor mode more or less upends the detective thriller with miraculous inversions and magical events, such as a chase through a thickly branched primeval forest moved to the modern countryside, being in which is like being locked into a schizoid mind. Katy becomes engaged to Arthur but marries Ambersides (Modred), then is seduced by the succubus Jasper, who sees her as the Fairy Fay—actually Morgan le Fay—while Modred is Arthur's darker nature. At last, all the characters are splinters of each other, and phases of the reader as well, awaiting Jungian individuation. Crawling about on the web of time makes for light and lively storytelling.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59849-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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