A depressing, disappointing first collection from accomplished gay biographer, novelist, and essayist White (The Burning Library, 1994, etc.). All eight stories here suffer from the weight of dread. In ``Pyrography,'' the fear is that of gay teen Howard, on a camping trip with two straight friends, while ``Running on Empty'' chronicles an American expatriate's visit to his relatives in Texas—a visit plagued by the young man's terror that his HIV infection will explode into full-blown AIDS and leave him at the mercy of the strangers who are his family. In ``An Oracle,'' Ray loses his longtime lover to AIDS, then goes to Greece, where he has a mindless fling with a male hustler. Here, as in most of the pieces, White enumerates the habits, traits, and tendencies of his characters, usually in the past tense, never letting them evolve, never letting them breathe with any verisimilitude. ``She had little sense of the dramatic possibilities her life provided,'' he comments of a woman in ``Running on Empty''—a remark that, unfortunately, could also be made about the author's depiction of all his characters, including those in, say, ``Palace Days,'' in which two New Yorkers move to Paris after the glory days of gay liberation end abruptly with the onset of the AIDS epidemic; they try fatally to keep their voracious and unsafe sexual appetites fed as friends and former lovers die off all around them. Throughout, the volume is filled with intelligence and clever, wry observations (``Like other brilliant men and women he dissolved every solid in a solvent of irony,'' the emotionally barren narrator of the title story says of another narcissistic American in Paris), but these moments are isolated and never connect into a coherent vision as they do so brilliantly in White's nonfiction. A dour side-trip by the well-traveled White.
Pub Date: July 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43476-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
IN THE NEWS
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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