A fast-paced, engaging look at the natures of faith and science.
A sci-fi parable in which an artificial man searches for answers to some of life’s deepest mysteries.
Pinocchio, the protagonist of Bosze’s fiction debut, views himself as a kind of thinking automaton, a “contraption” with an “amazing onboard computer”—his brain, which comes to conceive of his own existence and then to ask a series of elemental questions about that existence. What’s the point of life? Why are living things here? What’s the nature of reality? What are the limits of identity? Bosze takes his naïve, questing character through a series of encounters with various figures who expound on one aspect of life or another. When, for example, Pinocchio meets Artificial Man, who calmly says he was intelligently assembled, Pinocchio tells him that, in his own case, current scientific ideas stipulate that the opposite is true: “[W]e were just a freaky combination of chemicals in a pool of water that got zapped by lightning,” Pinocchio says, “and voila, four billion years later, here we are, complex biological machines.” (Artificial Man doesn’t seem convinced, and readers clearly aren’t meant to be, either.) A character from the future, named simply 4000 AD, reminds Pinocchio that “it is a common mistake to assume that comprehending some of the ‘magic’ is akin to erasing its mystery. But we found that the more our knowledge grew, the deeper grew the mystery.” Pinocchio moves from one such conversation to another through the effects of something called a Life Simulator, and that all-encompassing reality-replicator brings Pinocchio to many such alternate realities, including a New Earth, where he’s toured around a radically altered world. Bosze skillfully uses all these encounters to frame a number of metaphysical conversations and arrive at some metaphysical answers. “Let’s face it,” he writes, “there is no room for false modesty here—we humans (as far as we know) are the conscious universe. As pathetic as we are, there is no one with anywhere near the ability to challenge our ‘lofty position.’ ” The age-old religious and philosophical questions Bosze rehearses in this way are endlessly fascinating, and his fictional gambit makes his approach palatable to readers at most points on the faith spectrum.
A fast-paced, engaging look at the natures of faith and science.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500572723
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
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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