An uneven tale of the occult.
In this debut novel, modern life clashes with African magic as a young British woman finds herself the target of her stepmother’s jealousy and animosity.
The opening lines of Kenani’s book set the stage for this strange tale: “Real zombies have no memory of taste, emotion or warmth. My name is Anne Hoboka. I was a zombie.” Anne is the protagonist and narrator, and this is the story of how she became, temporarily at least, a zombie. Her trouble begins when she accepts a warm invitation from her stepmother, Tamara, who lives in Johannesburg, to spend winter break with the family on a trip to Rio de Janeiro. The group includes Anne’s father, her two stepsiblings, and Tamara. Anne agrees to leave the cold of London, where she is a third-year university student, to spend some time in the sun. But the family vibes in Rio are unsettling. Her father spends most of the vacation reading while Tamara begins lacing into Anne for no discernible reason: “You always have to be the centre of attention, you always have to be in control, and you always fight!” Anne returns to London and begins to slip increasingly into a serious depression. Always a high achiever, she now starts missing classes; she stops eating; she loses her boyfriend, Fritz. This ambitious tale offers a captivating premise and the tantalizing seeds of an engrossing mystery with an intriguing heroine—an inside look at the gradual breakdown of a psyche. Unfortunately, Kenani doesn’t build a framework through which to understand Anne or the relationships between family members, who are scattered from South Africa to Sweden. There are no referential backstories. It is difficult to comprehend why Tamara’s treatment of Anne results in such a total deterioration of her mental state. And Fritz’s repeatedly bland reactions to Tamara’s cruel phone rants—at one point, he says that maybe “she’s trying to help you”—are additionally puzzling. Anne has become paranoid. But is she delusional, or has she been placed under a curse? This question provides strong narrative potential. But the prose, overloaded with mundane, day-to-day details, lacks enough energy to create a compelling drama.
An uneven tale of the occult.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5333-5264-4
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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