A clever contribution to that popular subgenre, the satirical academic novel.
Novelist Farewell (In the Lighthouse, 2012, etc.) gathers together a covey of academics (and one outsider) who are literally on the trail of the mysterious Henry Radcliff, a Victorian novelist.
Radcliff wrote only one book, and there is only one extant copy. (A secretive collector allowed that one copy to be reprinted and then squirreled the original back away.) Brendan Jones, a crude, outspoken American journalist, has written a biography of Radcliff. Dame Agatha Peel, doyenne of British biographers, is working on her own Radcliff biography. The rest are a motley crew—young professorial strivers, mumbling older ones, hangers-on and a mysterious Frenchwoman. The narrator and protagonist is Sarah Bolton, an assistant professor at a backwater college in Ohio, who is pinning her tenure hopes on her feminist Radcliff scholarship. But she becomes more and more conflicted as the tour proceeds and also as she is drawn, against her best instincts, to bearlike philistine Jones. This is as much Sarah’s journey of self-discovery as it is a pursuit of Henry Radcliff. Jones and the egotistical Dame Agatha are of course the perfect foils for one another, and most of the others have their own agendas as they traipse across the continent visiting places that Prince Roniakowski, Radcliff’s romantic hero, had blessed with his presence. These people often confuse fiction and reality, take themselves much too seriously and generally behave like asses. Along the way, the only portrait of Radcliff seems to come to light, and a letter (in his totally illegible handwriting) has been found. More than that, it would be unfair to reveal, except that there is a really startling revelation toward the end, followed, possibly, by a final twist. Farewell is wicked good: The first chapter, for example, is a tour de force in perceptive writing that reveals Sarah despite herself.
A clever contribution to that popular subgenre, the satirical academic novel.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0977850945
Page Count: 339
Publisher: Puddingdale Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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