An absorbing, if uneven, mix of beguiling magical realism and bombastic social commentary.
A spirit—too scabrous to be completely holy—walks the earth weighing human souls in this florid fantasia.
Maffei’s nameless protagonist is a disembodied being who slips in and out of minds unnoticed, savoring or recoiling at whatever he finds. In letters to a book publisher named Ms. Sylvestri, he reports his impressions of the consciousnesses he samples—from a teenager whose ear-splitting music is “a screamworld of life’s-end chaos” to a man whose nose-picking is “as sensual, almost, as man’s penetrating taking of a woman”—and offers broader observations on human nature. He is particularly taken with sexuality, and pens odes to it that are sometimes romantic (“Oh, the sudden and alive spark of one man, one woman, joined at last, the joyous clasping together, two gods embodied in one bright flame”) and sometimes earthy (“You’ve got something I want! says man to woman, his eyes on her breasts, his hands on her sweet little ass as he sinks down on his knees.”) But he is also concerned with racism and sexism, particularly the persecution he feels whites and men suffer at the hands of blacks and women. The spirit’s soliloquies intertwine with captivating short stories about people he encounters, including a homeless alcoholic redeemed by a stray dog, a Hollywood producer and his resentful boy-toy, and an affectionate but troubled older couple at an amusement park. These strands unite when the spirit borrows a comatose man’s body and lures the other characters to an uncanny seminar at which he strips bare their souls in harrowing revelations. Maffei tells this tale in several hit-and-miss registers. His well-crafted narrative vignettes are written in a subtle, fluent prose that’s full of acute observations of character and emotion. The passages in the spirit’s voice are less convincing—declamatory or mystical, straining for big ideas—“Why do your laws so very much favor black racism over white racism?”—that are rather callow. Maffei’s ghost can be tiresome, but his living characters are well worth the read.
An absorbing, if uneven, mix of beguiling magical realism and bombastic social commentary.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450504874
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2011
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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