Intricately interwoven stories featuring sensual language and surprising sexual twists.
Twenty stories span most of the 20th century and several Sri Lankan families, emphasizing the pangs of exile and the wrench of breaking with tradition.
Mohanraj’s first collection opens in 1939 with “Oceans Bright and Wide,” which explores a couple’s decision to let their brilliant daughter, Shanthi, take a path that will lead to her leaving the country then known as Ceylon to study at Oxford. Their eldest daughter came home to live after an arranged marriage to a man who beat her; the parents show their love for Shanthi by letting her go. She turns up 16 years later in “The Princess in the Forest,” married to a University of Chicago professor she knows is betraying her. Her feelings about his affair are interwoven with the tale of Prince Rama, the woman he loves, and the bitterness that comes when his brother arrives in the forest to spoil things. In “Seven Cups of Water,” too-short, too-plump Mangai tells of her brother’s wedding day in 1948 and the seven nights thereafter, during which she encounters his bride in the family kitchen in an increasingly erotic connection. “Pieces of the Heart” introduces Shanthi’s athletic and studious daughter, Leilani, “a nice Tamil girl” and a student at the University of Chicago, who’s lured in 1966 to the roof of the library and into the beginnings of a love affair with her roommate, Sue. Later tales reveal the repercussions of the civil war in Sri Lanka. In “Mangoes with Chili,” a Sinhalese woman has a child by the Tamil boy her father refused to let her marry. When the troubles begin and her parents are killed, Himali brings the baby to Ashok; he leaves his wife, and the lovers emigrate to San Francisco. Their son Roshan appears again in “Challah,” now as a young hospital intern who becomes the lover of a gay doctor, only to reveal later that he, Roshan, is a married man.
Intricately interwoven stories featuring sensual language and surprising sexual twists.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-078118-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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