There's a wonderfully elegant and provocative story lurking within Kundera's latest, but it's not that easily accessible. In a metafictional conceit that works, Kundera, at his health club in Paris, sees an aging woman make a graceful but casual gesture of farewell to her swimming instructor. The gesture is seminal for Kundera, who begins to create a part-fictional/part- real existence for this woman whom he calls Agnes. Agnes, still mourning the death of her beloved father, yearns for solitude—for a life alone in the mountains of Switzerland away from, but in contact with, husband Paul an daughter Brigitte. Agnes also has a younger sister, Laura, who, Agnes feels, follows too closely behind her—''She imitated, but at the same time she corrected.'' Laura, who perfectly identifies with her body (unlike Agnes), who sees her body ``as an old factory scheduled for demolition,'' has many affairs—including a torrid one with Bernard, a famous media personality, increasingly uncertain of his worth. As he relates Agnes's story, Kundera also meets with some of the characters involved and—in separate chapters in which he introduces literary greats like Goethe—explores the meaning of immortality, love, fame, and the contemporary preference for images (themes that preoccupy his fictional characters as well). The affair with Bernard ends, Laura is devastated, and Agnes retreats to Switzerland. Driving back, she is killed in a bizarre accident, and Laura, who had long yearned for brother-in-law Paul, finally catches up with her sister by marrying him. And Kundera, again at his club, now sees Paul perform ``that clumsy male imitation of a beautiful female gesture'' and disappear. Agnes and her gesture have inspired a remarkably tender and wise story about love and death, but the novelist Kundera, gifted and original, might consider a separation from the philosopher Kundera, an often banal and intrusive heavy.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1111-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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