An uneven but frequently effective collection of stories about people seeking to understand themselves and their...
A collection of short stories and essays that lean heavily toward the postmodern.
Marcopolos (Almost Home, 2013, etc.) here offers 10 short stories, followed by two essays on the nature and history of the subgenre of postmodern literary fiction. Readers leery of postmodernism may want to read these essays first, in order to get the author’s perspective on the type of fiction he considers his stories to be. In general, readers approaching postmodern stories can expect less formal structure and more rhetorical game-playing than what they might get in the works of writers such as John Updike or John Cheever. Certainly, Marcopolos delivers on both those counts, as his stories are filled with narrative playfulness and, sometimes, conceptual strangeness. They offer a fairly wide variety of plots, although a common strand of personality investigation runs through most of them: “What drives you?” one character asks in the first story, “Tock,” and variations of that question appear in most of the following tales. As in any such collection, some entries are stronger than others. One standout is “Valhalla House,” in which Enzo, a college baseball player, is weakened by a recent elbow surgery; he can “feel the impact of losing everything,” including the loyalty of “all the people who loved him fifty pounds and a 95-mile-an-hour fastball ago.” Here, Marcopolos really captures the brutal realities of chancing everything on the possibility of a pro career. “Eroticoffica” is another strong entry, in which two young women take a break from their job writing pornographic e-books (“each cranking out many titles of hot-selling erotica each year”) in order to swap complaints and dreams; they go to an eccentric coffee shop, where their laughter inadvertently prompts another patron to go home and shoot himself. Despite the author’s essays on postmodernism, the best stories in this collection are the most traditional ones. There’s plenty here that Updike and Cheever fans will like, even if they’ve never given postmodernism a second glance.
An uneven but frequently effective collection of stories about people seeking to understand themselves and their predicaments.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0983459996
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Kykeon Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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