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THE GIRAFFE

Name: THE GIRAFFE
Author: Marie Nimier
ISBN: 1-56858-026-6

by Marie Nimier ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 1995

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The second of the French Nimier's five novels is the first to appear here: the high-energy tale of a boy—and then man— passionately in love with a giraffe. At 18, the half-orphan Joseph (his mother, from Mauritius, gave him her dark skin, while his alcoholic father is slowly dying) half-stumbles into a job: he's to travel to Marseilles, pick up a young giraffe, and escort it back to the Paris zoo, where he becomes its keeper. And thus begins a word-feast of a tale, told at the breathlessly unstoppable pace of a Beckett novel, that includes not only Joseph's love for Solange of the long lashes and soft eyes (``She was adorable''), but also scenes of Joseph's childhood, his several introductions to sex (he'd basically rather watch, it seems, and so would Solange), and his half-accidental setting of the zoo afire near book's end, though not before he's murdered an ejaculating masher named ``Colin B'' (ejaculations aplenty are strewn about here), and not before also murdering his beloved Solange—apparently from jealous anger following her once-only sexual submission to a male giraffe named Beethoven (whose you- know-what is huge). Method in all this manic madness may or may not emerge clearly. Interspersed are flashbacks to 1827, when a young giraffe, the first ever in France, is brought from Marseilles to Paris, a gift to King Charles X from the Pasha of Egypt. Through dream, hallucination, echo, library research and a curious old painting that he stumbles on (under hilarious sexual circumstances), Joseph learns that an escort and keeper of that first giraffe was named Yussef, that Yussef's turban was as red as Joseph's trademark red scarf, and that Joseph, however clownishly or calamitously, seems to be repeating history. Serious high-jinks—and talented intellectual slapstick—as the story of Empire is relived at the zoo.

Pub Date: April 17, 1995

ISBN: 1-56858-026-6

Page Count: 144

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.