A mildly entertaining but superficial treatment of this outsized writer.
The famous writer proves an elusive quarry in Malmont’s second (The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, 2006), a meandering fact/fiction hybrid about London’s last year of life.
At first the focus is on the far less well-known Hobart Bosworth, star of silent films and a studio owner, who’s made several movies out of London’s novels. Once Hobart and Jack were kindred spirits, but now, in 1915, Jack has ostracized the director after a squabble over money. So Hobart is a man on a mission: to patch things up, have Jack write an original screenplay and save his studio. He travels to Jack’s ranch in Northern California only to find his new house burnt to the ground (arson is suspected). The writer has moved on to Paradise, his name for Hawaii, and Hobart follows him. So far so good, but here the focus becomes diffuse as the viewpoint switches to Charmian, Jack’s second wife, protective and passionate. We meet Jack returning from surfing with a group of Hawaiian beach bums. It’s unlike Jack, who’s racked by pain (kidney problems). There, Jack the showman can’t resist staging an oceanfront boxing match with Hobart, a hokey scene which ends with the men reconciling in the surf, a warm-up for Jack’s spectacular, life-threatening jump from a high rock. As he explains to his confidant, Professor Homer, whose expertise is Hawaiian mythology, his head was full of Hawaiian history and Norse legends. Jack’s talks with the Professor, the heart of the novel, fail to shed much light on the writer’s tortured psyche; it’s his stunts that are memorable. For the rest, Malmont gives us colorful episodes (a psychedelic trip that Jack and Charmian take is pure ’60s) and bed-hopping between the principals. Teasingly, Jack writes that screenplay for Hobart but then burns it.
A mildly entertaining but superficial treatment of this outsized writer.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4722-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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