Enthralling setting in search of lifelike major characters.
A woman conducts an 11-year search for her missing husband only to find him hiding in plain sight: another tale of love gone awry in Israel from kibbutz-raised Canadian Ravel (Ten Thousand Lovers, 2003).
Dana Hillman’s husband Daniel was burned in a freak accident during army reserve duty. She was barred from seeing him at the hospital, from which he soon vanished. Assuming that he left because he feared his disfigurement would repel her, Dana places yearly, full-page newspaper ads declaring, “I will never ever ever ever stop waiting for you.” Daniel has a mail-drop address she’s never been able to trace, and a private investigation has turned up nothing. Several brushes with army intelligence lead Dana tantalizingly close to Daniel’s whereabouts, but she always comes up against an unspeakable truth her informants balk at revealing. The story’s present-time action spans ten days, and the first half alternates between scenes from her seven years with Daniel and her current peripatetic life as one of an embattled cadre of Israeli peace advocates. Terse, serviceable prose and somewhat stilted dialogue carry us through Dana’s everyday drama, as she photographs acts and symbols of resistance at pro-Palestinian “demos,” writes romance novels for hire, and copes with the other denizens of her beachfront apartment building, all of whom lend new gloss to the phrase “quirky alone.” Welcome diversions include tips on how to make chai-like café au lait, how to use onion slices to counteract tear gas, and how to write sex scenes the way Jane Austen would have, maybe. A fellow activist with whom Dana falls in conflicted love has a friend with connections, and Daniel’s location is finally leaked. The novel races to a conclusion as Dana’s beau geste at a checkpoint nearly scuttles her quest, but the longed-for reunion lacks emotional weight. Ravel has failed to convince us that Daniel was really missing, or much missed.
Enthralling setting in search of lifelike major characters.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058622-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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