Amusing—but 400 pages of chat is too much. Even the big tragic scene that accounts for Laurie’s character feels lost in the...
Second outing by the author of the comic paranoid thriller A Conspiracy of Tall Men (1998).
At 36 and unmarried, wedding photographer Laurie has captured other people’s vows at over a thousand weddings during the past ten years. Not just vows but also “the future as a hot green meadow that rolls on for years. And I step up and capture it in one-five-hundredth of a second.” Looking over old work, Laurie wonders how many of these vows have held. Many have, and these folks are delighted by her offer of a free photo of them in their home today. Laurie photographs divorcées alone as “last standing.” Hollow 35-year-old ex-husbands hit on her. Her own loneliness doesn’t interest her; “it’s just a dead body handcuffed to my wrist.” Father went insane, mother died of cancer, younger sister Lisa can’t straighten out the men in her life. We find that Laurie was married for 14 months but never owns up to it. Then she spies Gilligan Ford III, a handsome smiling stranger, 42, who crashes weddings. She goes through her files and finds that he has crashed 11 of her last 12 weddings. At the latest Hindu affair, he tells he that he actually does know someone, having been introduced to him a half hour earlier. Doesn’t know his name, though. She accepts his dinner invitation. He takes her to the closed aquarium (for which he’s an accountant?), where he’s had a duck dinner set out by the shark tank. Her glass shell splinters. His wife died of cancer five years ago. Lisa uncovers that Gil has inherited his dead wife’s wealth. When Gil wants to know how Laurie knows this, she hides Lisa’s shame—and soon true love goes far astray.
Amusing—but 400 pages of chat is too much. Even the big tragic scene that accounts for Laurie’s character feels lost in the swash. Too many subplots, Mozart!Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32273-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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