FaraZ’s sweeping debut novel examines love, tragedy and the enduring bonds of family.
As World War II ends, the members of the Bartolo family, who operate a modest restaurant in Milan, are mourning the death of their eldest son, Paolo, one of two Bartolo brothers who fought in the war. When Lorenzo Fabrizi, a charismatic friend of surviving brother Cesare, breezes into town with grandiose plans for the future, Cesare is at first skeptical, though he and his beautiful sister Serena are soon entranced. A business partnership is quickly forged among the friends, and Serena falls madly in love. The novel follows the now-joined families as they begin to build a successful business. Spanning several decades, the heart of the story lies in matriarch Serena. She’s deeply religious and fiercely protective of her family, working tirelessly to champion and protect her three children. While the novel juggles several plotlines and a myriad of characters, the touchstone is Serena and how she copes with the family’s trials and triumphs. FaraZ tackles a wide range of topics ranging from infidelity and mental illness to physics and philosophy, with varying degrees of success. The most authentic moments are focused on the inner workings of family. The tension between siblings and parents over conflicting desires is genuine and relatable, and the redemption of Serena’s youngest son, who refuses to recognize his illegitimate daughter, is particularly poignant. With dialogue written as if the novel were a play, characters often have long, drawn-out monologues; a character might monopolize pages in long speeches, many focused on the merits of physics and theology. Many of these repetitive, unnatural conversations are from minor characters and seem more developed than those within the larger plotlines. As is, this moving generational novel spans decades but perhaps explores one too many themes.
A dramatic, at times unwieldy story about a tumultuous Italian family.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500307097
Page Count: 510
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2014
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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