A stiff but sometimes moving debut about a day in the life of an 88-year-old woman. The often crotchety Ruth has lived for 20 years in a condominium complex in southern California, wondering ``How in God's name'' her life ``could have turned out like this?'' In pondering that question, she recalls a life in which ``She had been prudent. She had risked little. She had lost little. She had chosen correctly.'' And yet things still pull terribly at her heart: For decades, she's been ``marooned with a moron,'' her kind but foolish second husband; her granddaughter is married to a man whom Ruth finds self-interested and irresponsible; and her health, at long last, seems to be failing (she sees white lights, feels pangs, has spells). The secret core of Ruth's emotional life is her keen yearning for her first husband, Hale, who died long ago of a bizarre virus. During Ruth's reminiscences, we get glimpses of characters from the past—an opera-singing aunt who tricked her way into marriage to account for a pregnancy; a flamboyant friend from UCLA who owns a racy lingerie shop—as well as characters from the present, like Ruth's understanding and beloved cleaning ``girl'' Luzma and her little son Luis. Phillips's task—to write interestingly about the confined doings of an ancient, guarded, set-in-her-ways person who feels that life has passed her by—is a daunting one; and, while the events and details of Ruth's mundane life of TV dinners, old photos, and crotchety habits aren't always either captivating or patently charming, her day—an outing, a meal, a visit—nevertheless draws to a close (``The past seemed to steer her'') in small and genuine steps amidst passages of writing (``Life, she thought, was so incredibly temporary. Nothing ever lasted, nobody ever stayed'') that can draw strongly on a reader's heart, however briefly. An ambitious first novel, in all, that suggests a strong emerging talent.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-74285-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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