An episodic history of 40 years in an unnamed woman’s life, from childhood through early middle age, told in 11 subtly related stories: a debut collection by the Canadian author (new to American readers) of the highly praised recent nonfiction The Convict Lover. Simonds establishes her protagonist’s dreaminess in the first (title) story, which describes a seven-year-old girl’s explorations of the Brazilian hotel where her family lives while her father manages a nearby factory’specifically, her sighting of a neighboring guest who keeps a lion in his room and calmly walks the beast through the hallway. It’s a nifty image: both an expression of the child’s untrammeled imagination and a fantasy of protection and empowerment. The girl’s later experiences often take similarly visionary form: Instruction from a beloved teacher stimulates a meditation on the likely existence of angels; trips to Mexico and Hawaii summon up an understanding of the blessings and curses of continuity, conferred by viewing the ruins of an ancient Mayan city and seeing'in the specters of carnivorous tropical birds'disturbing corollaries to “the image that came to mind when I thought of myself: indistinct and flayed, nothing left but glistening bone and sinew.' These stories’ narrator is an incarnation of restlessness who phlegmatically distances herself from her family and home (in rural Ontario), sleepwalks through an itinerant marriage to a German sculptor, the father of her two sons, then separates from him and takes a lover while continuing to seek a “home” in the aforementioned and other foreign lands, eventually returning to Ontario, where Simonds concludes the book with a marvelous summary story, “The Day of the Dead.” This is a revelation of the woman’s encounters with death, climaxing with that of her mother and ending with a lyrical intimation of her own passing. Beautifully wrought, emotionally complex, satisfying fiction. Simonds may be the next Alice Munro.
Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14591-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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