A hard-edged collection of finely wrought stories.
In this short story collection, Rashidi (The Outcast, 2014) offers dark tales of rural Iran.
The setting of Rashidi’s fiction is one of meager village life, characterized by the ubiquitous “dust, bits of hay and the stench of dung.” In “Galeen Khanum,” a young girl is forced into an early marriage with a local lord, and the trauma of the consummation leads her to an unhealthy fascination with Islamic promises of the afterlife. In “Ashura,” a peasant boy has a disturbing first experience with the eponymous holy day, during which men lament the memory of the ancient Battle of Karbala by shedding their own blood with cleavers. In “Omar Koshan,” a family attends a yearly festival, the “rowdiest of carnivals, initiated by religious hatred, ever held anywhere in the history of humankind.” Ostensibly an occasion to burn an effigy of Caliph Omar the Cursed, the festival devolves into a chaotic excuse for insults and score-settling. Each of the 16 stories explores the intersection between the individual and an oppressive, tradition-dominated society: the people, lacking the language or vision to transcend the weight of inherited culture, generally come away worse for the encounter. Rashidi is an adept chronicler of village color; his tales are full of gossiping women in flowery chadors, scampering children, destitute beggars, dancing gypsies, scheming mullahs, and old men lazing with their chibouks and opium pipes. The world he creates is so detailed and frenetic that it feels like a documentary, not historical fiction. Most stunning of all is that Rashidi makes no attempt to romanticize the past: the livestock and excrement, the cold and dust, the threat of dangerous neighbors and of the wilderness outside the village make his Iran a legitimately unsettling locale. He doesn’t try to psychoanalyze his characters through a modern lens, but he’s clearly interested in the traumatic effects that the hierarchy and ritual of this world have on its inhabitants, particularly the children. The context of religious and ethnic history is often lost on the characters, if it’s even explained; even so, the ripples of tradition, embodied in the wealthy, the ordained, and the mad, influence their lives in ways that they cannot escape.
A hard-edged collection of finely wrought stories.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1629211664
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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