Freiner pushes his protagonist toward insights that he never quite realizes in this relentless survey of eroticism and drug...
A young addict chronicles his struggles with cocaine, alcohol, and especially sex in this debut novel in stories.
In the letter that opens this book, M., the narrator, pleads with a past lover, L., to “find this collection of short stories from my life as my sincere attempt to explain who you really lived with for more than ten years.” It’s a project that may be as important to M. as it is to his addressee, to whom he admits, “I don’t know why I almost shot you that night.” The stories are all linked by M.’s recollections of his idealization of and callousness toward women. As the book moves deeper into his past, details of M.’s faith and city provide additional context. Author Freiner refreshingly mixes up the usual beats of addiction narratives, beginning with M.’s successful attempt to get sober in the first full story, “Evil Eyes,” which chronicles his redemptive affair with the daughter of a woman whose sadism catches him off guard. The tales also have moments of droll humor; for example, as M. prepares for his first confession while in the throes of sexual awakening in “The Saint Sisters,” he reads a catalog of sins and notes that “the Catholic Church was a very detail-oriented organization.” M. is portrayed as a lively but repetitive narrator; he explains his categorization of women as “possible mothers of my future kids” or “sluts” at least twice in the collection, for instance. He also has a maddeningly muted sense of agency throughout, reporting that he feels “disconnected from my body” during a tryst and that a “mysterious power” leads him to pick one woman over another. He doesn’t seem to understand why he does things or even comprehend how disturbing his actions are, whether he’s threatening to kill African-Americans in chat rooms or concocting a scheme to seduce a 14-year-old girl—which raises questions about what readers are supposed to take away from this collection.
Freiner pushes his protagonist toward insights that he never quite realizes in this relentless survey of eroticism and drug abuse.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-76618-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2016
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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