The author of Skin Deep (1989) this time takes as his protagonist a bright but annoying Berkeley Ph.D. student who uncovers an anthropological gold mine in the cities and remote countryside of Mexico. Brian Mendoza catalogs museum artifacts in Mexico City at Templo Mayor, the sanctum of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, while he pursues his research on ritual sacrifice. He is the kind of pompous grad student who interrupts his professors' lectures, and his arrogant attitude immediately sets him at odds with his supervisor, Arturo Torres, into whose office he sneaks at night to read the translation of the Xotl codex. This tells the story of the fall of Aztec empire to the Spaniards and the flight of Xotl, a priest of the god Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, who was overthrown but vowed to someday return and reclaim his rightful throne. Ascertaining Xotl's destination and the mysterious bundle he transported could solve a 400-year-old anthropological puzzle and help a turbulent country reassert its identity in time to welcome the new dawn for Mexico that Quetzalcoatl prophesied. Brian theorizes that Xotl headed toward the Yucat†n; despite the hostile presence of government soldiers and Mayan rebels, he heads there with Greg Stone, an old Berkeley roommate, and Marina Soto, a local journalist with whom he falls in and out of love. His progress is followed closely by two powerful Mexico City rivals, Professor Xavier Zapata, director of Templo Mayor, and Alejandro Villalobos, a wealthy businessman with an acute understanding of Aztec culture. As his academic research assumes political dimensions that he could never have imagined, Brian reconnects with his Mexican heritage, which teaches him more about himself and the father he lost as a young boy. With the help of his sophisticated lover and renewed ties with his family, he even becomes slightly less stubborn. A solid story skillfully blending mysticism with historical fact.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86479-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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