Strangely compelling despite (or because of) the unreliable narrator, this novel will intrigue fans of the unconventional...
Debut author Pick’s Kafkaesque postwar tale about an American student at the University of London who’s a highly unreliable narrator.
In 1956, Paul Scudery, a young man from Rhode Island suffering from chronic anxiety but a healthy libido, travels to London to study British history. Impressionable and insecure, he gets caught up with England’s fading Communist Party while joining rioters in firebombing the offices of the Daily Worker. Soon, the American Embassy recruits him to spy on the local party leader, Jane Falmouth, whose daughter or niece—it isn’t made clear—becomes his lover. But was he recruited? Did his girlfriend dump him? And did he accompany fellow boardinghouse student Rolf to Vienna to volunteer at the Hungarian refugee camps, or did he stop in Mannheim and spend the week with another lover? Paul obviously has a problem separating reality from fantasy—or, perhaps, he is living in parallel universes, as Dr. Victor, his unaccredited analyst, suggests. As the young man’s accounting of events is increasingly at odds with that of his friends, it becomes clear the reader can no longer trust him. He is studious and polite; he is sexually aggressive and explosively violent. Which is the real Paul? Even his landlord’s dog alternately cozies up to him and attacks his ankles. Maybe he has a doppelgänger, as the hapless Dr. Victor speculates, or perhaps he’s simply suffering from an identity crisis. Author Pick has concocted a twisting narrative that reveals secrets and then tears them apart. His writing style is alternately lush and clipped, full of sentence fragments: “With the thought, I felt the first drums. Not drums. Something pounding in my head. Beyond my head. My heart struggling to remain confined within itself.” He has deftly created an atmospheric England in the 1950s—a setting that is the most reliable aspect of the book. Fittingly, toward the end, Paul’s philosophy professor turns to Jean-Paul Sartre and his theory that “reality is what the individual makes of it.” Readers may find themselves nodding their heads in agreement as the story flits from dream to reality to a climax that rapidly plunges to an existential conclusion.
Strangely compelling despite (or because of) the unreliable narrator, this novel will intrigue fans of the unconventional and exasperate those who expect tidy endings.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478286356
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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