An intelligent tale of a family still haunted by a murder long-ago in far-away Kenya. British writer Blake (Waiting for the Sea to Be Blue, not reviewed, etc.) deftly evokes the country now and as it was in the last days of the Raj in this story of London banker Michael Ballantyne. With a glittering rÇsumÇ, an old family name, and a career in the making, Michael lacks only a wife. Then he meets Olivia Jones in his dentist's office, of all places, and is smitten. Olivia falls for him, too, but she's hardly typical banker's-wife material: Her mother Eugenie is living in a hospital for the insane, and Olivia herself is about to head off to the Kenya desert, hoping to convince her brother David, a teacher at a mission school, to visit Eugenie, whom he has not seen since she was tried for murder. When Olivia somehow goes astray in the wilds, Michael flies out to Kenya to find her—and, while awaiting news, hears the family's story from her Aunt Jessie. He discovers how Eugenie fled Africa and her handsome scoundrel husband, Gareth, for England, bringing their children along; how she later became reconciled with Gareth and was persuaded to rush back to Kenya, where he again abandoned her. Eugenie, penniless and pregnant with David, permitted childless Harry and June Crane, whom she'd met on the boat from England, to adopt him. But, increasingly unable to accept the adoption, she began stalking the child, the poignantly absent yet not hopelessly distant object of her increasingly deranged affection. Finally, the accidental death of her older son led her to attack June fatally with a knife. Now, back in the desert, Olivia, ill and dehydrated, is rescued by a tribesman. The lovers are eventually reunited, although not before Michael has been tested severely by people and a way of life alien to the board room and the Ballantyne estate. A refreshingly sensible take on sensational crime.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-75280-162-7
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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