A sordidly raw, funny and oddly affecting look at two wasted lives.
A raunchy, messy debut novel about two young people not quite in love.
Right at the start of this fast-paced, foul-mouthed story, the unnamed narrator is having a horrible day: Her car has been stolen, but the 911 dispatcher sternly reminds her that the line is for emergencies only, and her boyfriend, Robert, sends her a text that reads: “Boo I’m br8ing up with u. sorry.” The hapless narrator is no poster child for innocent living: She’s not particularly bright, she’s extremely fond of drugs and alcohol, and she’s not exactly the best worker at her faceless office job. “I work at Petrus Cheong and Affiliates. I don’t know what my job is,” she says. She spends her evenings wasted; she spends her days loathing her co-workers, the people who get her coffee orders wrong—everyone, basically, except the random celebrities on TV she fantasizes about: When she thinks of actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s cooking recipes, she idly reflects, “I wish I could meet her, hang out with her, be like best friends. I’m pretty sure we’d get along great—we have so much in common.” She wants her Robert back in her life so badly that she sees no real problem with texting him back and telling him she’s pregnant; the only problem is that she then needs to get pregnant, or else she’ll run the risk of his breaking up with her again. They get back together, and the rest of the novel follows the constant zigzagging of their relationship, with Robert getting fired from one job after another, uselessly dreaming the whole time of writing a million-dollar screenplay as the narrator offers him one piece of stoned, dopey encouragement after another. Etarie peppers virtually every line of her novel with obscenities, all of them deployed with a deadpan pacing and humor worthy of Richard Price. Despite the two main characters’ flagrant shortcomings, Etarie’s skill at portraying their brainless, aimless hope actually generates sympathy where none should exist.
A sordidly raw, funny and oddly affecting look at two wasted lives.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0988051515
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Murder Island Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 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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