Whether read as thriller or allegory, Ishmael’s fall from grace has a lacerating power.
A psychologically harrowing and literarily provocative portrait of a mind unraveling from tragedy.
Though the prolific Everett (Wounded, 2005, etc.) has employed a variety of different narrative strategies, this first-person confession finds the novelist at his metafictional best. In almost claustrophobic fashion, the reader inhabits the mind of “Call me Ishmael” Kidder, who steeps his narrative in the richness of literary and philosophical allusion. While pondering the essence of storytelling, of identity, of words themselves, Ishmael continues to circle around his plot’s pivot: the rape and murder of his 11-year-old daughter, Lane. The incident followed Ishmael’s separation from his wife, Charlotte, which may or may not have been preceded by Ishmael’s infidelity (he can’t be sure whether he cheated in his mind or in truth, wherever truth may lie). Yet living apart from her father plainly had a disturbing effect on Lane, making Ishmael feel complicit (though not of rape or murder) well before the fatal brutality suffered by his daughter. “I may not be at fault or to blame, but I am guilty for the death of my child,” he confesses. Ishmael is also a storyteller, a writer of romance novels using a woman’s name, and the rest of the story he tells concerns the revenge he wreaks on his daughter’s murderer, a diabolically deliberate process that takes as much toll on Ishmael as it does on his prey (unnamed, perhaps even imaginary, whom Ishmael ultimately refers to as his “victim”). Within what Ishmael refers to as “this sick thing I call a mind,” there is wordplay that evokes Joyce, Chaucer and Lewis Carroll. There are philosophical debates between Plato and Socrates. There are meditations on what Ishmael calls “the functions of language,” the last of which he asserts is “to cause pain.” For Ishmael, there is no escape from his mind in this novel. And none for the reader as well.
Whether read as thriller or allegory, Ishmael’s fall from grace has a lacerating power.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55597-476-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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