A museum of a place and time that’s filled, however brightly, with trinkets.
Tel’s first novel (Arafat’s Elephant, stories, 2002) is a slight, poetic little thing that has its considerable charm but remains determinedly airy and unballasted.
When Freud escaped Vienna and settled in London, he was to die there the next year, in 1939, victim of cancer of the mouth. Tel’s story takes up that year or so in 26 alphabetic “chapters,” from “Apple” to “Zebra,” that describe prewar London, the neighborhood Freud lived in, and aspects of his daily life, mainly concerning his friendship with Ernest Jones, the great protégé of Freud’s who, in this telling, euthanizes the great man (though in real life, Jones wasn’t the one). The patient, indeed, had bouts of great pain, and he came to London already wearing an artificial palate—a device that, in one whimsical passage, jumps out of Freud’s mouth and flies around, chattering. Fancy can be powerful (and powerfully charming), but here it hints at a will-o’-the-wisp quality of the whole that keeps Tel’s little novel from drawing the strengths it seems to want from its subject. A light-toned treatment of Freud—at one point he sees a number of patients in a day: all are magically cured—is hardly taboo, but Tel’s true subject just doesn’t quite ever get chosen. Is it Freud? London? The coming war? The past? At one moment, London is described (to Freud’s perplexity) as a city where feeling must be hidden behind humor, at another as a city quaintly going about its Our Town–like ways (a postman’s “wife is pregnant with what will become the goalkeeper of a first-division ball team 1962-67”), at another as a city where no one has an inner life. Even if a reader just follows along with the author’s mercuric eye, there’s still the matter of Freud, like Tel’s London, never quite getting in focus, solidifying, or deepening, resulting in a book that, at end, has a central figure but not really a central character.
A museum of a place and time that’s filled, however brightly, with trinkets.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-219-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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