A novel that wavers between fireball excitement and abysmal vulgarity, that leaves the reader dazed with complexities and a feeling that greater spiritual health might have resulted through never having read it—though zillions will. Robbins is no clearer this time out than he's ever been. The sex-and-cocaine-driven, power-hungry plot begins with such rapid editing and scene-switching that the reader's feet barely get grounded before they're somewhere else: For about a third of the novel it's straight action/adventure on the Amazon; then the byzantine plot becomes Robbins's fettuccine Alfredo, with strands dipping and whipping and doubling back until even the main characters don't know who's on whose side—and even the most unaware reader realizes that Robbins's storytelling is as important as his story. If you can follow it, Robbins has failed. Jed Stevens (formerly Di Stefano) is induced by his Mafia cousin Angelo into a trip up the Amazon that turns out to be a big coca-leaf buy; they are accompanied by beautiful translator Alma, who is immensely proud of her ``Peruvian pussy''—but they are attacked by mestizos, Angelo is eaten by piranhas, and Alma gets Jed out of Peru and back to Manhattan, where Jed's Uncle Rocco (Angelo's father) is top capo and wants Jed to join him in the Mafia except that Jed wants to get into airlines and with a big loan from Uncle Rocco buys fleets of jetliners and rents them out to small countries but then finds himself involved in huge junk-bond deals and more or less legitimate credit scams while Uncle Rocco unsuccessfully tries to retire from the Mafia so that he can die with honor at home in bed rather than by a hail of bullets during a time when lead-filled bodies are falling on every other page and surreal financial deals are clinched by world-hopping satyrs and girls who say, ``Would you like some pussy pie? But just remember, you'll have to lick your fingers, it's very, very juicy.'' Unclean, unclean!
Pub Date: June 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-52479-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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