Murky, self-conscious meta-fiction, full of intellectual name-dropping.
Esteemed Hungarian writer Esterházy (Celestial Harmonies, 2004, etc.) blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction in this novel about a mother, perhaps his own, whose life centers around soccer.
There isn’t exactly a plot. The middle-aged narrator, who lives in suburban Budapest, reminisces and ruminates about his childhood and adult life with the help of literary allusions and wordplay. Sentences run on for pages while he layers impressions on top of memories, metaphors onto philosophic concepts, characters’ viewpoints within other characters’ dialogue. While trying to navigate the flood of language, American readers will find themselves grabbing at the incongruous but useful footnotes, which offer some minimal help in sorting out the onrush of names and ideas. The narrator’s 90ish mother, in failing health but still a pistol, talks incessantly about soccer (sometimes translated as football). Readers will learn more than they ever wanted to know about Hungarian players and team politics, as well as more significant issues of national politics and culture. When the narrator was growing up under communist rule, his father was brutalized as a scion of the famous Esterházy family. His mother used her passion for soccer as a survival mechanism for herself and the family. She worked in a factory that also employed members of the national team. A beautiful woman with spirit, she manipulated her ability to make friends with the players to advance her career. But the soccer team was always watched by an informer, a party member who may or may not have seduced the narrator as a child. The novel emulates Lampedusa’s The Leopard (referred to repeatedly and admiringly) in its aristocratic nostalgia and choice of an aging protagonist at the cusp of national change, but Esterházy is far more ambiguous and convoluted in his approach to history.
Murky, self-conscious meta-fiction, full of intellectual name-dropping.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-179296-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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