A well-executed rumination on ancient and familiar characters.
Campalani imagines the inner monologues of Jesus Christ in this short prose collection.
Campalani’s Jesus desires only love from an early age, knowing, as he does, what his future has in store for him. As a child, he asks Mary whether he can sleep in her bed, where he can feel safe and warm; “No,” she replies, “you must get used to loneliness. You’ll die alone.” Though the title refers to three voices, the narrators of all three sections are Jesus Christ at different ages. “Jesus” covers his early years, with vignettes describing his parents, his teachers, and his apprehension about his destiny. “Christós” covers the major events of his ministry, including his baptism, his time in the desert, and the Last Supper. The brief “Jhavè” limns his death on the cross, which involves him imagining a mirror that reveals his own difficult identity. Intro and outro sections—“First Letter” and “Farewell Letter”—bookend the work, which totals 48 pages. Campalani’s treatment of her subject matter is both subdued and earnest. She doesn’t go for irony or revisionism, but neither does she rob her subject of relatable human emotion. The result is a work that approaches the tragedy and affection that its source text must have originally possessed before it became dulled by centuries of reiteration. While Campalani’s language (or perhaps it is Sage’s translation from the Italian) sometimes veers into the abstract or clichéd (“This is my baptism of fire….You will join the revolution”), there are many small, quiet moments that show Christ as an individual. In one early scene, the child Jesus comforts his widowed mother who, after being rejected by a man at a wedding, realizes she can no longer be a sexual being: “She put a hand on my head to caress my hair. In that moment, my mum died as a woman, and she became the Mother: the earth, the moon, humidity, the night breeze, its thickness everywhere, the soil, the womb, honey, milk, pomegranate trees.” They feel real, and it is startling.
A well-executed rumination on ancient and familiar characters.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5191-8833-5
Page Count: 54
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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