A quaint, evocative tale of a philosophical striver in early 20th-century America.
A humble man seeks personal and spiritual clarity in this historical novel.
Ostby’s follow-up to his World War I novel Men With Broken Faces (2010) turns its focus to the story of Jake Miller, “a feckless, undistinguished, mostly-reformed sponge” who struggles with binge drinking and the personal legacy of a miserable childhood and an abusive father. He also strives to understand his own version of the Tibetan Buddhist wheel of life, the bhavacakra, whose ups and downs seem to rule his life. The novel that chronicles his life opens in 1913 on a down point, with Jake drunk, facedown in a slough near his Montana wheat farm. He’s counseled by his stolid neighbor Lars Nordraak to clean himself up for the prospect of the arrival of his contracted wife, Mable, a clean-faced and unflappably upbeat woman who throws herself into their homesteading life. She’s a cheerful presence, though she understands Jake very little; his favorite book, for instance, is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is lost on her. She forgives him his shortcomings—shortcomings he’s acutely aware of: “He possessed self-awareness,” he realizes, “but only in retrospect, and that was the conundrum.” As a young man in Iowa, he was kicked in the head by a mule and lay comatose for a week before he recovered, and the clear implication is that his inner world was never again the same. Ostby begins his tale in the first decade of the 20th century, when water dousing and patent medicines were still taken seriously in small-town America, even as rudimentary technology and the brand-new automobile were making their first appearances. Although the narrative can at times have a maddeningly wandering shapelessness, Ostby effectively brings to life small-town America of a century ago. And an uplifting thread runs through it all—“Forgive yourself,” Jake is advised, “Don’t bother with going to some priest for forgiveness; you have to forgive yourself”—which ultimately helps make Jake a winning Everyman.
A quaint, evocative tale of a philosophical striver in early 20th-century America.Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991448203
Page Count: 284
Publisher: James Ostby
Review Posted Online: May 27, 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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