Kay is consistently entertaining in this subtle, sad psychological thriller.
Here is le Carré writ small yet still tense in a quiet thriller set amid the less glamorous work of back-office surveillance for the British government.
It’s two weeks before Christmas 1981 in London, and Stephen Donaldson—28, single, and Oxford-educated— is headed for a crisis. He works for the government’s Institute, which bugs people of questionable politics—Reds, revolutionaries, Irish Republican Army operatives. He listens to the recordings and makes note of anything significant. Nothing much is: his “caseload seldom offers the possibility of drama.” That changes when his superior tells him a top-secret case code-named Phoenix may involve disloyalty by an Institute insider, but the case also may be closed if nothing of substance emerges soon. This threat furnishes another sort of drama, for Stephen has become infatuated with Helen, part of the Phoenix equation, merely by listening to her on a daily basis. In his desperation to maintain the connection with her, he begins fudging reports and breaking Institute rules. Will he be caught? Will he bag Phoenix? And who is the friendly, foreign-accented Alberic, met in a pub proscribed by the Institute? Kay (The Translation of the Bones, 2012, etc.) uses fine observation to create the mind of a desperate, faceless bureaucrat in a tedious job. Stephen's past life emerges through his own and his mother’s memories. Perhaps his love for Helen is rooted somehow in the lost twin sister who died shortly after birth or in being raised by a woman alone after his father abandoned them in Stephen’s childhood. His fantasy of love exists at Mitty-esque extremes ranging from chivalry to the heartthrob treacle James Joyce mocked in the character of Gerty MacDowell. Yet Helen brings meaning to a life-eroding job, and like the femme fatale Stephen will never encounter, she represents a danger he cannot help flirting with.
Kay is consistently entertaining in this subtle, sad psychological thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-941040-45-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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