A precisely rendered image of a quest to tease out life’s larger meaning.
In D’Agincourt’s (All Most, 2013, etc.) novel, a woman reflects on her family’s shared history and the shadow it has cast on her own life.
“Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?” This fundamental question, once posed by French artist Paul Gauguin, forms the scaffolding for this novel. Its protagonist, Jocelyn, takes a piercing, introspective look at her past. It’s only now, as a middle-aged woman, that she recognizes that every family “possesses a prevailing philosophy”—one that brings them together in complex ways. For her and her parents, the central fulcrum was art, and in her own life, the “philosophy” was manifested by a Canadian painter, Alex Martaine, whose work appears to have been inspired by Gauguin’s. Alex’s affair with Jocelyn’s mother deeply unsettled Jocelyn, who was, at the time, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. In the present day, she uses the title of Gauguin’s painting “Where Do We Come From?, What Are We?, Where Are We Going?” (pictured on the book’s cover) as the basis for her own voyage of self-discovery. In three sections that tackle each of the title’s questions, Jocelyn takes readers from her claustrophobic early years through middle age as she searches for the meaning of life. Although her early rebellion takes a familiar, almost predictable form, readers may overlook it as one of the few weapons in a confused teenager’s arsenal. D’Agincourt’s economical prose is frustratingly clinical at times, working much too hard to adhere to the “glimpses” promised in the novella’s title; as a result, it gives readers little else. Yet these moments mirror the feel of childhood and the gradual process of self-realization remarkably well—images pieced together in broad brush strokes. At one point, for example, Jocelyn looks at the aforementioned Gauguin painting and observes that its “rich and exotic” colors are “out of keeping with the detachment in the characters’ faces....The uninhibited sensuality oppresses me, entraps me.”
A precisely rendered image of a quest to tease out life’s larger meaning.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989174558
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Portmay Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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