A warming, delightful novel unabashed in its depiction of life’s eccentricities.
In Starypan’s debut novel, a random act of compassion leads to an eventful, winding journey of self-realization and transcendence.
The novel’s protagonist, nicknamed “Biter,” finds himself out of a job as a zoo employee when he decides to release a recently acquired wolverine back into the forests of the Pacific Northwest. This radical decision costs him his livelihood, but it also affords him a chance to rethink his life’s plan. He tracks down his friend, JT, and an acquaintance, Ryan, and soon sets out on a trip through Washington state’s rugged Pasayten Wilderness. During the journey, he briefly becomes disconnected from the group, prompting him to think about an earlier time when he almost froze to death on another mountain. After he safely returns home, he patches together a living from a handful of odd, but oddly rewarding, jobs. As a restaurant dishwasher, he meets Mickey, a down-and-out war veteran who suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder due to witnessing the gruesome combat death of his friend. Biter also gets work as a research assistant for a professor studying clams. Happily, though, he ends up as a bartender at the Red Dragon, a local hangout where JT also works, where he can cultivate a new beginning. But just when things are settling down, tragedy occurs, and Biter must decide whether he can sustain his new life. This gently written yet perky novel grew out of an attempt by Starypan to write a memoir; he even shares his fictional protagonist’s nickname. The result is simultaneously moving and unsentimental. It manages to link together what initially seem to be nothing more than a series of discrete, disjointed episodes in one man’s haphazard life. Throughout, the author weaves Biter’s memories of his past into his present-day narrative, rendering the main story all the richer. In doing so, he creates a thoughtful, quirky and even comic chronicle that demonstrates how even apparent chaos can resolve into a coherent story.
A warming, delightful novel unabashed in its depiction of life’s eccentricities.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495429255
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 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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