Corsaro’s karma? Still in question.
First novel—and a horror novel at that—by veteran opera director Corsaro.
Eight years ago, David Sussman went to India to sit at the feet of Rajneesh, and when he returned to Manhattan’s Psychiatric Institute he tried to get the Institute to bring Buddhist ideas to bear on the its method of analysis. For that, he was tossed out. Although he has some Buddhist trimmings in his office and technique, Dr. Sussman will strike few as a therapist of great resources when he reduces analysis to “games people play”—but we know he’ll pay for his simple-mindedness. Beautiful millionairess Laurel Hunt approaches him to look into the case of her prominent art dealer husband, who has been invaded, she says, by an evil entity or malevolent force that David comes to know as “Kunma.” His wife ties Hugh Caswell Hunt’s breakdown to the murder of Charles Kirkwood Palfrey, acting head of the Hunt Galleries in London, whose tongue was ripped out. When David interviews Hugh and reads up on him, he decides to transfer Laurel to bubbling occultist Dr. Ara Havakian, who warns David about Kunma but then has his own tongue ripped out and his brain chewed by canine-like incisors. Can it be the work of Tibet’s brain-eating Tolos monster? A tape Ara made of Laurel reveals that her husband is bisexual and that she’d had an affair with the late Charles Palfrey. David beds her, too, and she tells him that now he’ll also be on Kunma’s list. Then the drooling mouth and teeth of dead Palfrey savagely attack Laurel’s genitals. When David at last faces tongueless Kunma, a soul trapped in hell, he finds the thing seeking him as a teacher. Can David’s answers lie in the Tibetan Book of the Dead when he finds himself part of Kunma’s karmic destiny?
Corsaro’s karma? Still in question.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30472-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
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
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