An amusingly overstuffed first novel by a Canadian-born British journalist, which incidentally resembles (and was probably inspired by) Peter H—eg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, skillfully recounts the labyrinthine adventures of a resilient heroine who’s part James Bond, part Ripley (from Alien). “Roz Bengal” (born Rosalind Benegal), daughter of a Scottish father and Indian mother, is called away from her career as a BBC Radio writer-producer to return to India (her birthplace) and the aid of her married half-sister Miranda. The latter’s fears for her life have something to do with the ritual murders of transsexual prostitutes, and rather more to do with the creepy demeanor of her husband Prosper (named for the French writer MÇrimÇe), a prominent director and eminence in Bombay’s thriving film industry. Every door that the intrepid Roz opens, so to speak, reveals further trapdoors and secret passageways, as she falls variously into collusion with or afoul of such vividly drawn figures as guru-archaeologist Ashok Tagore, an English art dealer (wickedly) named Anthony Unmann, and Prosper’s wily former colleague Caleb Mistry, whose script for a planned film version of (what else ?) The Tempest turns Shakespeare’s great comedy “into a story about the colonizers’ contempt for the people they colonize.” The priorities indulged by these and at least a dozen other suspicious characters are neatly juxtaposed with Roz’s own professional agendas (she’s a journalist who’ll do anything to get her story) and personal burdens (solutions to several of the mysteries that challenge her are buried in the past with her dead parents). Forbes keeps it humming, in a lively narrative whose really rather formidable intellectual content (including, among other subjects, meteorology, alchemy, forensic pathology, and at least three kinds of forgery) is agreeably leavened by good old melodramatic standbys like a looming monsoon, a cobra poised to strike, and numerous hairbreadth escapes. Roz and Smilla would have gotten along just fine. Top-notch entertainment.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-11530-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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