A diverting travelogue with some admirable writing but little arc or narrative theme beyond assorted recipes.
World traveler Idris Granger doesn’t cook well, but in Thomas’ collection of short stories, he collects recipes for different delicious dishes everywhere he goes.
Over the course of these 10 tales, Granger sees parts of the world that most people wouldn’t think of visiting. Each story is accompanied by a recipe Granger learned from one of the other characters, who range from the daughter of an Irish pub owner to a would-be kidnapper in Australia to Granger’s roommate in South Africa. The stories are either full of action or personal tension. For instance, working in a mining camp in Tasu, British Columbia, Granger discovers a cook who abuses his assistant, and the story centers around what the rest of the crew do about it. Granger leaves with a recipe for fish pie. He gets a recipe for seafood chowder from his friend Dan, a “fugitive recovery agent”—aka bounty hunter—in Italy. While hunting pigs in Australia, Granger and a boxing champion come across kidnappers, one of whom gets a lighter sentence for being coerced into his crime and for having a great recipe for lamb shanks. Tales like the latter strain credulity to the breaking point, and at times, the recipe element seems forced into the story for the sake of the theme. Only the most dedicated gourmand would accept that a kidnapper could cook meat well enough for it to factor into a legal judgment. Thomas does have an eye for description, though. His characters frequently feel real, and his settings capture danger and beauty, whether at a camp in Israel or in a sprawling countryside. What readers don’t get is any real sense of who Granger is, what he might believe or why food is so important to him. He’s an empty vessel, a stand-in for the reader, often a mere spectator. He simply drifts, leaving the settings and supporting characters to do the heavy lifting.
A diverting travelogue with some admirable writing but little arc or narrative theme beyond assorted recipes.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477580301
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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