Hairpin turns on Piranesi paragraphs that often climb nowhere and twist the brain into taffy. Wonder full.
A sheaf of Mathews’s artifacts from the past twenty years or so, perhaps only for connoisseurs of the gold-packed sentence, including early stories from Country Cooking (1980), midcareer stories from The American Experience (1984), plus ten fresh new pieces (Singular Pleasures, 1993).
The collection opens gloriously with a story not for everyone, a factual fiction that flows from Mathews’s 1952 Harvard degree in music: 1980’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent: The ‘Bratislava Spicatto’ ”—a cellular fantasia on late-romantic conductors, composers, artists, and their familial crossbreeding (the floating affinity of who’s related to whom), which tells of the invention of the Russian mode of unplucked pizzicato bowing on the violin—or maybe we’ve got that wrong, but, aside from its convivial linguistics as it follows the webbings of talent among musical artists, it bears no tie to T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 essay of the same name (minus the subcolonnic “The ‘Brataslava Spiccato’ ”). “The Dialect of the Tribe” gives a supremely tortuous look into Pagolak, the language of a remote New Guinea tribe that refuses to translate and, indeed, means to be untranslatable, unless you approach it with “a ripeness as for dying”—and even that won’t be enough. “Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)” is quite likely the best satire on cookbooks ever written and focuses on shoulder of lamb with double stuffing (farce double). “The Taxidermist” tells of a woman who charges a flat rate and, when done, tips up “the flag of her antique taxi meter on her bedside table.” One cannot read all these stories at once, however brief the book, and couldn’t even at half this length. The mind can hold just so much surrealism at a time before it waddles about doubly stuffed with farce double.
Hairpin turns on Piranesi paragraphs that often climb nowhere and twist the brain into taffy. Wonder full.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2002
ISBN: 1-56478-321-9
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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