This tale of three cities loses cohesiveness amid all the globetrotting.
Poet and novelist Reeve (Robert Frost in Russia, 2001) offers a knotty, self-consciously literary narrative about two sisters, one a London painter, the other an academic living in Paris, who eventually transform themselves in New York.
After a childhood spent living with Aunt Margaret in Evanston, Ill., the girls went their separate ways and have not seen each other since. In Paris, Christine DeKalb is a Rousseau scholar who has married a hot-shot American venture capitalist, Mark, and has an eight-year-old, thoroughly Frenchified son, Nicholas. Jan Sawyer, a recovered drug addict whose painting is just beginning to take off and earn money, lives in a Camden Town squat with her funny, lovable boyfriend, guitarist Tom Henderson. In alternate chapters, Reeve records the lives of the sisters, which move in a parallel direction, then gradually intersect, at the urging of Aunt Margaret, in a Christmas card. Christine’s situation is more dire, as she confesses to her sister when they meet in London: Unhappy with the fashionable social rounds her arrogant husband secures through his Common-Market ties, Christine is having an affair with a Norwegian composer and filmmaker. Moreover, Christine has discovered that Mark’s business éminence grise, Ron Harmon, has actually sponsored her academic position without her knowledge, thus exposing her husband as a Machiavellian opportunist. To further test the sisters’ maturity, Jan is offered a commission she can’t refuse: to come to New York and paint self-congratulatory portraits of Harmon, Mark and the influential hostess and socialite niece from whom the men derive their power. Reeve’s story is a kind of cultural patchwork among the three cities (the scenes of New York are most unconvincing). The dialogue is a sophisticated prattle featuring pretentious quotes from Bartlett’s, and there’s plenty of corny national stereotyping—Nadine the French housekeeper, for instance, bakes tarts all day.
This tale of three cities loses cohesiveness amid all the globetrotting.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-59051-145-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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