A slow, sure novel that burns away the glamor of war.
A fictionalized account of the life of Norman Bethune, the Canadian war physician.
The narrative, composed of a series of letters, begins at the end of Bethune’s life. Addressed to a daughter he has never seen, Bethune’s letters at first seem merely informative. They include rambling accounts of growing up as the son of a strict minister, his eventual break with his father’s religion, his first unhappy marriage and, finally, his decision to fight in World War I and then join the republican cause as a doctor in the Spanish Civil War. The letters are framed by his current life at a makeshift hospital in China where he aids Chairman Mao’s campaign to drive the nationalists out of the mainland. Action-packed to be sure, and yet, the letters become more searching, weaving together world events with a history of Bethune’s love affair with Kajsa, a Swedish woman he meets in Spain during the war who becomes the mother of his daughter. Bock’s masterful narration gives a sense of the urgency of this world-changing moment, and of the exhilaration of being a player on a world stage, and from this emerges an unexpected portrait of Bethune as a manipulative narcissist who specializes in hiding his pettiness under a cloak of disinterested nobility. Bedazzled by war, Bethune trembles with awe when he meets Mao, but he cannot manage to maintain even the semblance of good relations with colleagues who are at least as committed as he to serving a common cause. Blind to everything but his high motives, he does not seem to register that Kajsa is under suspicion of being a spy. The novel’s strength lies in its masterful revelation of Bethune’s paradoxical combination of dishonesty and highmindedness. Bock (The Ash Garden, 2001) paints a picture of a fundamentally amoral, if politically pious, man who does not see that he loves war more than he loves peace.
A slow, sure novel that burns away the glamor of war.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4462-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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