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FARGO BURNS

Name: FARGO BURNS
Author: Kos Kostmayer
ISBN: 978-0-692-03649-5

by Kos Kostmayer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2020

An effective, tragic story of a decent man in a battle with the vicissitudes of life.

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A man in crisis tries to find answers.

Playwright and screenwriter Kostmayer’s first novel begins with a bang and a crash. It’s 1971. The Vietnam War is raging, and 32-year-old Fargo Burns is throwing furniture, pans, brooms, and anything else he can grab out the window of his 12th-floor New York City apartment. He’s been hearing voices again. He's “losing his grip.” He feels sad, bewildered, and lost, yet somehow satisfied. Kostmayer draws upon his extensive dramatic experience to fashion an existential novel which is more play than prose, driven primarily by dialogue. Kostmayer employs first- and third-person narrative, interior monologue, and voices, like the chorus in a Greek drama, which emanate from Fargo’s mind, to roughly stitch together his story. This “night of fearful, inexplicable misery and violence” sends Fargo to the hospital, where he meets Lane Dubinsky, a sympathetic psychiatrist. The story moves back and forth between Fargo’s messy existence and his sessions with Lane. He’s broke, unemployed, living on welfare, and abusing drugs and alcohol. He’s separated from Holly, his wife, and their three children, whom he loves. After his release, Fargo finds a dingy apartment and regularly returns to his old haunt, Havoc, where he once worked as a bartender, coming under the spell of sexy, poetry-reading Billie Speed, girlfriend of psychopathic killer Kohler Skane. Frequent flashbacks to Fargo’s youth in Bitter Forest, Mississippi, introduce us to his family, the bigoted South in the 1940s, and the joyful as well as harrowing sources of those voices. Fargo is broken; he wants to be “fixed.” A big decision about his future awaits. It could end in a bad way. Kostmayer takes us on a bumpy, erratic ride, but there’s much here to admire.

An effective, tragic story of a decent man in a battle with the vicissitudes of life.

Pub Date: March 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-692-03649-5

Page Count: 222

Publisher: Dr. Cicero Books

Review Posted Online: July 9, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.