Sexy premise, mushy plot.
Rosner’s breathy, lightweight second novel (The Speed of Light, 2001) concerns a German artist and his Israeli model.
Both Danzig, a 58-year-old painter who’s been blocked for years, and Merav, who poses for his class at the San Francisco Art Institute, have suffered traumas. Danzig, the son of Nazis, carries the weight of shame that drove him to leave Germany for years before. He made a splash as an artist in California in the early 1980s, but at present, he only teaches and won’t paint. The considerably younger Merav left Israel after Arab-Jewish violence killed her closest friend, Yossi. While posing for Danzig’s life-drawing class, she is chillingly reminded of the story of her grandmother, Esther, discovered hiding in a barn during WWII but spared by a German soldier overwhelmed by her beauty. (Parallels between the two stories are drawn throughout.) Taken by Merav’s good looks, Danzig convinces her to come to his Marin County barn so he can paint her. Instead of bedding her instantly, as he has done with other models (with disastrous consequences), he allows Merav to guide him as his muse. (“He wants her, but not in the flesh.”) Plenty of wispy flashbacks attempt to give these characters some weight: the 1953 suicide of Danzig’s older sister Margot, who was devastated after learning the truth about their parents; Danzig’s previous affairs with models Andrea and Susan; teenaged Merav’s life on a kibbutz; Merav’s switch from artist to model and her brief marriage to a photographer. The author strains to show her characters correcting the historical record.
Sexy premise, mushy plot.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-44222-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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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