An enjoyable magic carpet ride back to an earlier time and a gentler place.
Two narrators, separated by nearly a century, tell a tale of old-time charm and contemporary agita.
It's 1975, and Lux Lysander, a 20-something single mother in San Francisco, is besieged by modern life. Working as a waitress, she's living paycheck to paycheck, with “maxed-out credit cards, beans and toast for dinner three times a week.” Her young son, Benno, is the product of a brief fling with a black soldier killed in Vietnam. To escape from her problems, Lux (Latin for “light”) goes alone on a camping trip to California’s wine country, Sonoma, also known as the Valley of the Moon. By an improbable freakish combination of full moon and dense fog, she's transported to Greengage Farm (pop. 278), a 1906 idealistic community trapped in a time warp that occurred because of the great San Francisco earthquake. Joseph Bell, in his 40s, is the Londoner who founded Greengage in honor of his idealistic mother, who committed suicide. Lux learns that Joseph, a man profoundly ahead of his time, has created “a residential farm where all jobs were equally valued and all jobs, whether done by men or women, paid out the same wage.” Naturally, Joseph, who conveniently becomes a widower midway through the book, is “six feet tall, with dark hair and eerie light blue eyes.” Lux is the only outsider who knows about Greengage, whose residents vanished without a trace. The book is mainly Lux’s story as she falls in love with the community, ping-pongs through time, and flirts for a decade with Joseph. For the most part, author Gideon (Wife 22, 2012, etc.) deftly handles Lux’s disorienting and occasionally loopy lifestyle. Will Lux decide to permanently stay with handsome Joseph or return to the headaches of her real life? You guess.
An enjoyable magic carpet ride back to an earlier time and a gentler place.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53928-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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