A grimly effective entertainment, at once broad as a saber and pointed as a pike.
Kafka is brought up to date for the age of Brexit and Trump.
Never mind that in his Lectures on LiteratureVladimir Nabokov protested that “he approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown”: Gregor Samsa, or, that is, Jim Sams, emphatically starts life as a cockroach in McEwan’s (Machines Like Me, 2019, etc.) reimagining of The Metamorphosis. Then he awakens to discover that he has just four limbs as well as, revoltingly, that “an organ, a slab of slippery meat, lay squat and wet in his mouth.” That unwonted tongue will come in handy, but for the moment Jim has other things to attend to, for he’s not just a human, but also the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Instead of leaving the European Union, he has another item on his agenda: He’s backing a weird economic notion called reverse-flow economics, or Reversalism, whereby "the money flow [will] be reversed....At the end of a working week, an employee hands over money to the company for all the hours she has toiled. But when she goes to the shops, she is generously compensated...for every item she carries away.” It’s easy to get the American president, a fan of “fleet-footed liberation from detail,” to sign on to immiserate the taxpayers once Jim explains that he can take all the money slated for the Pentagon and make it flow up the chain into his own pocket, with the magical result that “seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars would be his.” Why bother small-scale looting when there’s so much pelf to be had? Of course, Jim twigs, the American president is on board only because he was once a cockroach himself, as were the rest of the world’s ruling and governing class, who flourish wherever people tolerate “poverty, filth, squalor” and choose to live in darkness. McEwan sweeps wide but hits home, Nabokov aside: He does a pitch-perfect Trump, pegs Angela Merkel’s bewilderment that her former allies are “inflicting these demands on your best friends,” and highlights the venality of the Leave crowd in Britain today.
A grimly effective entertainment, at once broad as a saber and pointed as a pike.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-08242-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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