For readers with a high enough threshold for meandering diatribes to make it to the end, answers to certain questions—e.g.,...
The latest creation from Sutton (Thong Nation, 2006, etc.) is a mad man in a mad world, obsessed with brand names and luxury but furious with cheap materialism and shallowness of life in London as the credit crisis of 2008 unfolds.
When he isn’t wooing women who want nothing to do with him, Matt harangues retail clerks and managers as he attempts to return shoes, luggage, designer eyewear and other ill-advised purchases that he goes from fervently desiring to deeming faulty. He’s having cash-flow problems which he attempts to remedy by offering friends and family further “investment opportunities” in a murky business scheme he’s hatching with the North Koreans. Dumped by yet another girlfriend, Matt turns from disturbed to unhinged—his rambling internal rant follows increasingly sinister misadventures punctuated by ominous gaps in which the women he encounters, spies on and stalks disappear. Consumed with ire with others’ excess and jealousy over their seemingly endless credit, while he, broke and bashed-up by violent incidents that are never fully elucidated is forced to cadge free meals from the friends and associates he compulsively mistreats and to steal cheap wine, he spirals downward into a paranoid, self-destructive loop. His narrative becomes elliptical and contradictory, rife with nonsensical digressions and digressions within digressions, usually on his purchase history and feelings on design, style and the lack of integrity in name-brand products. Very little happens, although there is a sort of progress to his decay. An image, contradictory to his deluded self-image and fantasy-life, begins to emerge from glimpses of his reflection and others’ shock and disgust at his increasingly bruised and scratched face, his wonky glasses and disheveled demeanor. Meant to be a satire, what little humor there is in his absurd turns of mind and in the juxtaposition of his delusional rants and pathetic reality soon wears thin, with little support from the weak plot and meandering language. But are Matt’s murderous thoughts just thoughts?
For readers with a high enough threshold for meandering diatribes to make it to the end, answers to certain questions—e.g., what’s actually going on with Matt? will he ever manage to escape to North Korea?—aren’t much of a reward, given the larger question posed by a lack of story, entertainment or meaning: Who cares?Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60945-007-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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