Dazzling early Calvino, stories from the mid-Forties and the Fifties. There are four categories: "Riviera Stories," "Wartime Stories," "Postwar Stories"—and "Stories of Love and Loneliness," in which some of Calvino's later, expanded-on conceptual concerns (reading, photography, people uncomfortable within the environments they've created themselves) have begun to emerge. And the most wonderful of these, as comic as it is metaphysically profound, is "The Adventure of a Bather": a matron, swimming alone, loses the bottom of her bathing suit and cannot emerge from the sea, realizing that it is her nakedness now that has become the greater sea, overtaking and overcoming her like an error that must be paid for. Likewise, the "Riviera Stories"—sun-shot, fragile works—align with Calvino's interest in fairy tales; each is about an Eden of sorts, with illusions of happiness, farces of shame, and Oblomovian cheerfulness ("Lazy Sons") in the face of objective defect. But the surprise for English-speaking readers, most of whom know only later Calvino, will be the "Wartime" and "Postwar" stories. In the first group Calvino details the horrors of war with enormous realist dignity—focusing on Italian peasants whose cunning is the sole weapon left to defend themselves with; the terror is made strangely more terrible by the peasants' blend of naivete and keen perceptions. (How bullets, for instance, somehow make the whole world feel as if it's made mostly of air.) And, though more relaxed and humorous, the "Postwar Stories" are abrim with the same humanity: burglars in a bakery, prostitute shortages, sleeping arrangements of refugees in a train station, the accommodating schedule of a streetwalker's husband—all funny, sad, unstressed, something like little De Sica films. Calvino, unlike Dine Buzzati (above), eschews heavy and sentimental ironies; unlike Borges, his metafictional resources have no scorn to them, instead a darting kind of tact. In sum: wondrous work from the early career of one of the world's greatest living writers.?
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1984
ISBN: 0156260557
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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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