A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.
Two lovers seemingly meant for each other plunge into a hellfire of contention, recrimination, and grief in Eberstadt’s unsparing fourth novel (after When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, 1997).
She’s overachieving Gwen Lewis, who works for a privately funded human rights organization offering redevelopment aid throughout the former Soviet Union. He’s Gideon Wolkowitz, an anarchic puppeteer and street theater performer whose merry band (Pants on Fire) is devoted to sabotaging NYC Mayor Giuliani’s policy of selling publicly owned buildings to corporations. Accidentally meeting both at home and abroad, Gwen and Gideon instantly, ecstatically connect: their mutual sexual hunger recognizes no boundaries, and when Gwen finds herself unexpectedly, inconveniently pregnant, they bravely rearrange priorities, and marry. Then the furies begin to descend. In a densely allusive, insistently metaphoric prose style (somewhat akin to Hortense Calisher’s), Eberstadt brilliantly employs a form of hectoring direct address to both her protagonists, concentrating with—well, furious intensity on Gwen’s panicky realization that the imperatives of childrearing may forever estrange her from her chosen life, and on Gideon’s constant need (shaped by a loveless itinerant childhood and youth) for validation and security. He loses himself in “work” scorned by Gwen’s upscale family and friends. She doggedly juggles care of infant daughter Bella with the career that’s slowly slipping away from her. Both parents are caught in “the trap of love-gone-wrong: you withdraw your love, and your lover, feeling unloved, acts only the more unlovable . . . . ” The noose never relaxes: a horrific shock climax seems to promise the freedom each demands of the other, but brings only further compromise and captivity. This essentially unoriginal plot gains great depth from two exhaustively penetrating characterizations and from Eberstadt’s virtual genius for ironically precise summary statement (“The earth is the Lord’s, but the abominations that you commit on it are your own,” etc.).
A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41256-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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