A strange, disjointed novel that will sometimes delight readers but mostly flummox them.
A sweeping history of a family with immigrant origins and of a nation in turmoil.
In his debut novel, Essen tracks the eventful life of a man named String Ambuehl beginning with his grandparents’ arrival to the United States at the conclusion of the 19th century. String’s mother and father, Rose and Irving, meet in San Diego and stumble through a halting romance that finally bears fruit during the Prohibition years. They give birth to String, who later becomes the first in his family to graduate high school, just as the United States fully enters World War II. He then joins the military, but the story discloses little about his experience as a soldier. Later, he attends college and develops philosophical sympathies for communism—a dangerous intellectual bent during the tense Cold War years. He’s eventually charged with and arrested for espionage, and the book closes with an account of his trial. Inexplicably, Essen, as himself, speaks directly to readers beginning in the ninth chapter, explaining that a life-threatening medical condition may thwart the completion of his book. From that point on, he intersperses autobiographical vignettes, recounting his own contributions to the creation of the personal computer in Silicon Valley. There’s no artistic need for these minimemoirs, and their inclusion is both confusing and jarring. Also, although the author has a prolific imagination, it’s unfortunately undisciplined; he seems intent on conjuring as many characters as possible without endowing them with real personhood. The plot, too, is wildly creative but frustratingly directionless. It’s clear that the story is meant to evoke biblical themes, as it’s spangled with quotes from the Bible, but their relevance is never made clear. For example, in lieu of a description of a sex scene, Essen offers, “an invisible heaven of angels and saints…no war or strife exists there, only eternal peace and blessed rest. No evil spirit can invade that heaven. Rather Satan has been cast out, and his authority taken from him.” The book as a whole is a powerful demonstration of Essen’s fecund mind. However, that alone won’t command readers’ attention.
A strange, disjointed novel that will sometimes delight readers but mostly flummox them.Pub Date: July 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-42086-7
Page Count: 354
Publisher: HeronDrivePres
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
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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