Gourmet cooking, the television industry, private-school troubles, and one of NYC's last eligible bachelors amply furnish the life of Caroline Sindler in this warm, if disappointingly anticlimactic entertainment by Rossner (His Little Women, 1991, etc.). The youngest child of a New York Jewish academic family, Caroline takes after the family's Italian housekeeper, a passionate cook, rather than, say, Gertrude Stein. Bored by college, Caroline spends a summer as an au pair in Italy, where she gets pregnant by- -and consequently married to—Angelo Ferrante, a Sicilian ladies' man. At least she can cook in the restaurant where he tends bar. Predictably, once the couple move to Rome to operate a restaurant of their own, Angelo returns to his stable of mistresses while Caroline slaves in the kitchen and tries to care for their daughter, Olivia. The restaurant succeeds, but the marriage doesn't; Caroline says good-bye to 12-year-old Olivia (who refuses to leave her father) and retreats, traumatized, to her parents' Westport, Conn., home. Two years later, just as Caroline has recovered enough to start holding cooking classes in her Manhattan loft, Olivia reappears, claiming that her father has recently married a monster and begging to live with her mother instead. Caroline has good reasons for optimism: Her precious daughter is coming home, prospects are brewing for a cable TV cooking show, and the Jewish doctor upstairs is showing romantic interest. But she hasn't reckoned on spoiled teenaged Olivia's furious accusations and desire for revenge, which demands that several lives be shattered before mother and daughter can forget and forgive. The climax builds, fueled by Olivia's anger and Caroline's guilt—but in the end, this competent chef solves all her troubles so neatly and easily that one wonders what the fuss was about. Until then, though, engrossing characters and entertaining riffs on the importance of traditional meals keep the pages turning. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59720-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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