Breslin’s (English/Northwestern; The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties, not reviewed) first volume draws heavily from the postwar years, with uneven but generally stirring results. Several of the poems are dated from the 1960s and chronicle personal interactions with political movements, as in “White Wound / Black Scar,” about an ill-fated play depicting race relations. The poem ends in a kind of ars poetica, in which the play’s charged script becomes “bitter words that unsaid themselves / because we agreed to say them, and closed, / with its visible scar, an open wound.” The “visible scar” that language creates in its very ability to heal governs these poems, which can venture into painful territory without stripping away complexities or covering up paradoxes. The core is a series about the troubled life and eventual disappearance of the speaker’s father. These pieces have some of the vigor of late Robert Lowell, their confessional stance in dialogue with a wryly musical poetic line (“months of lassitude / punctured by fitful tennis”). Breslin also shares Lowell’s shortcoming that the more ambitious poems don’t always seem to add up to more than the sum of their parts, leaving images and ideas half-formed. Ultimately, the most satisfying works here are about other kinds of art. The short lyric on Webern and the prose poem about Corot offer the shock of recognition, of the interpenetration of one kind of art into another. Even the poems about personal experience give the sense of artistic compositions both beautiful and fleeting; “First Kiss,” for example, laments the loss of “the orange and red glow / of the Japanese lanterns, / broken in liquid arcs / on the nightlit pool.”

Overall, a satisfying debut.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8101-5102-2

Page Count: 80

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ARCHER
by Paulo Coelho ; illustrated by Christoph Niemann ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
HIPPIE
by Paulo Coelho ; translated by Eric M.B. Becker

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SPY
by Paulo Coelho ; translated by Zoë Perry

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.