A slim, sometimes stiff novel that succeeds in selling the mystique of Venice.
Steinberg and Steinberg summon the magic of Venice in this short debut literary novel.
Pietro Contarini is an architect living in Venice, where his ancestors were once one of the city’s leading families. He works with Vittorio Pisani, an ambitious real estate developer who is interested in changing the ancient face of the city, though this is somewhat at odds with the vision of Venice that exists in Pietro’s mind. It’s no matter, though: Pietro has accepted a job in Rome that will take him away from his hometown and its problems. As his time in Venice winds down, he meets two figures who exert a strong influence on him. One is Alessandro Zane, another developer (recently of Beirut), who has his own a master plan—La Nuova Venezia—to save the city: “What, I asked myself, was being done about infrastructure, canals, acqua bassa, acqua alta, flooding, cost of living, the old crafts, the traditions, corruption, and, above all, tourists?” The other is Maddalena Bocchese, a painting restorer who has a much more traditional—even mystical—sense of what makes the city unique. Pietro also finds counsel with Francesco Contarini, his long-dead grandfather who is buried on the island of San Michele. Can these figures—living and dead—convince Pietro to fight for the Myth of Venice? The Steinbergs describe Venice in painterly detail: “At this time of day, the bright Venetian light sharpened the palazzi façades. Their colors, once dazzling, had tempered over time, creating subtle differences among these old buildings. Later in the day, when the sun moved west, the light became more raking and the colors deepened.” Written by a couple married for 57 years, the story is accompanied by many full-color photographs, some by their adult sons, that illustrate the places and buildings discussed. It is a short novel, and it seems to exist mostly to highlight the aesthetic soul of Venice and the ways the city is under threat. As a result, the characters and their dialogue have a somewhat didactic tone, though everything they discuss is generally compelling (especially as the reader sees photo after photo of the city). If nothing else, readers will walk away feeling a new urgency to visit Venice for themselves.
A slim, sometimes stiff novel that succeeds in selling the mystique of Venice.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69639-214-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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