Deeply atmospheric, impressively learned, endlessly suggestive: it won’t mean much, though, to readers who haven’t wrestled...
Historian Pierce Moffett’s ongoing scholarly obsession with “magic, secret histories, and the End of the World” is depicted in ever darkening hues—in the forbiddingly dense third volume of Crowley’s ambitious Aegypt Quartet (Aegypt, 1987; Love and Sleep, 1994).
As before, the action is set both in the remote upstate New York town of Blackbury Jambs and in memories of rural Kentucky and a heritage of violence—a legacy the reclusive Pierce is still trying to escape. Furthermore, the present narrative is mirrored in excerpts from the bizarre children’s books of Fellowes Kraft, as well as from Pierce’s research (inspired by Kraft) into the histories of the 16th-century philosophers “heretic” Giordano Bruno and English scientist-mystic John Dee, whose “dealings with the spirits” (a form of the “daemonomania” that grips Pierce) may have awakened dark forces that threaten overweening mortals. These potent materials easily upstage a comparatively wan contemporary story that centers in Pierce’s confused relationships with two women named Rose (who may be Platonic halves of a single feminine figure), a little girl named Sam who suffers inexplicable seizures and may be a “sensitive” attuned to unearthly harmonies, and the menacing Powerhouse International cult. Though its surface is refreshingly lucid, this overstuffed novel turns on a “plot” that’s really a series of episodic variations on the Aegypt Quartet’s commanding theme: that a “secret history” grasped by only a few humans underlies the world we think we know, and directs our actions. Dreams and foreshadowings, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, the kabala, astrology, Neoplatonism, and many other skillfully assimilated sources and influences suffuse a narrative likewise steeped in grand mythic resonances—as a childless mother becomes Demeter seeking Persephone, and Pierce both a subdued Faust and a chastened Prospero resigned to the necessity of “burning his books.”
Deeply atmospheric, impressively learned, endlessly suggestive: it won’t mean much, though, to readers who haven’t wrestled with its equally demanding predecessors. Crowley’s work is a taste well worth acquiring, but you have to work at it.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10004-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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