A touching story of attachment to a beloved, troubled place.
In her debut novel, Lynch writes about the injustice of colonial rule and institutionalized segregation through the story of a young Goan tailor who moves to Africa.
As the novel opens in Goa in 1913, Sabby Mendes is a 15-year-old tailor’s apprentice. Hearing of people leaving Goa for East Africa, Sabby decides to try his chances in Kenya. Perhaps to reflect his youth, Sabby’s first-person thoughts are given in simplistic, sometimes clichéd language. For instance, he justifies his choice of Kenya with “it would be different, and I was ready to try something that was not like Goa.” He settles in Nairobi, where he eventually opens a tailoring business. He thrives professionally but remains lonely; luckily, it’s love at first sight for him and Trinia, the Goan woman his parents choose for his arranged marriage. Lynch successfully weaves in momentous historical events—Princess Elizabeth’s visit to Kenya, the Mau Mau Uprising, and Africanization under Jomo Kenyatta—as well as technological and cultural shifts. Best of all, she gives a strong sense of life in a three-tiered racial hierarchy: colonizers at the top, then Asians, and Africans at the bottom. Train cars are segregated, and Goans give up their seats at Sunday Mass to let Europeans sit in front. Racism is an unfortunate reality that only hits home for Sabby when his youngest daughter wanders onto a whites-only beach. The book’s scope is perhaps too wide, however, necessitating awkward indications of time passing. The insistent chronology seems more appropriate to a family memoir. Lynch grew up in post–World War II Nairobi, so likely this novel has autobiographical elements. A plodding pace and some punctuation problems don’t overly distract from the elegiac tone that follows a late bereavement and Sabby’s sense of displacement as more and more Goans, including his children, accept British passports and emigrate. He insists “my heart is here in Kenya,” and the tender finale proves it.
A touching story of attachment to a beloved, troubled place.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7485-9
Page Count: 282
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2015
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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