As Minot observes, there are “three strategies for survival.” We know two of them, fight or flight. As for the third—well,...
Twenty pieces of powerhouse short fiction.
Selected by a jury that includes A.M. Homes and Christine Schutt, this gathering of the current crop of PEN/O. Henry Award winners makes its own argument. Even so, volume editor Furman does almost nothing in her introduction to give the stories a context beyond “savage fierceness”; a more vigorous account of the whys and wherefores of the anthology, in the manner of Bill Henderson’s introductions to his Pushcart Prize collections, would have been welcome. If conflict is the necessary foundation for literature, then the collection abounds in it, to greater or lesser effect. Far and away the strongest piece, Tamas Dobozy’s “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived,” has the highly compressed makings of an epic reworking of Les Miserables, its setting a Hungary caught between its fascist rulers and the advancing Red Army, its dominant moods fear and shame. In “Pole, Pole,” Susan Minot outlines the toxicities within family and neighborly dynamics; Chris Adrian allows a grieving man to insult a small child to perfect effect in “The Black Square,” a fine piece of psychological writing; Lily Tuck’s “Ice” encompasses whole worlds, the landscape of the heart imposed upon the landscape of Antarctica, with its great herds of penguins: “They are small and everywhere underfoot and Maud feels as if she is walking among dwarves.” Conflict abounds, yes, but the greatest exemplars of that savage fierceness are stories that deal with the efforts of us puny humans to withstand the elements; much of Jim Shepard’s superb story “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” for instance, takes place atop a cliff, with little echoes of Max Frisch’s great yarn “Man in the Holocene” bouncing off the granite, while Matthew Neill Null’s “Something You Can’t Live Without” will give the claustrophobic new reasons to be glad they’re not trapped inside caves full of “blind wormy salamanders, hare-eared bats whose wings were silk fans brushing their faces.”
As Minot observes, there are “three strategies for survival.” We know two of them, fight or flight. As for the third—well, about that this well-chosen selection has much to say.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-47237-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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