A diabolically clever return to a world classic.
This contemporary retread of Dante Alighieri’s famous work offers a clear message of love and respect for all creation.
The year 2020 will mark the 700th anniversary of a great work of world literature: The Divine Comedy. Dante’s masterpiece gives readers a tour of the Christian afterlife in three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—set in hell, purgatory, and heaven, respectively. In this book, d’Oro (Back to Eden, 2015, etc.) provides a modern update of the first and most famous installment. In some ways, his text is scrupulously faithful to the original. As Dante did, d’Oro himself appears as the protagonist in a tale that follows the author on a descending tour through an underworld. His version of hell, like Dante’s, is peopled with real-life, infamous characters. The original Inferno is not only religious, but also political; Dante put many of his real-life enemies (and some of his friends) into the fiery abyss. D’Oro’s work similarly offers a panoply of well-known characters: Donald Trump and Barack Obama, Donald Rumsfeld and National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre, and celebrities Jon Stewart and Gilda Radner, just to name a few. But there are crucial differences from Dante’s work, too. Prime among them is the fact that, for d’Oro, hell is simply Earth—and, more specifically, a surreal, alternate version of Los Angeles. Further distinguishing himself from the devout Dante, d’Oro writes, “Hell is a man-made place, / Not a God-made prison to punish sinners.” In this tale, humans are their own worst enemies, but mankind has other victims, too, and d’Oro sees the degradation of the natural world as high up on its list of sins. This is a welcome expansion of Dante’s original project, and it gives d’Oro’s crafty, entrancing book real ethical weight. The author also borrows the rough contours of his style from medieval Italian, adopting the latter’s famed poetic form of terza rima. He does well not to adopt all the rhymes that the form requires, however—a task that bedevils even the most skillful English-language translators of the original Divine Comedy.
A diabolically clever return to a world classic.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5373-2486-9
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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