An impressive debut that, though it drags a bit in the middle, establishes a constant and ingeniously engrossing sense of...
A teenage girl and her Iranian lover, 17 years her senior, embark on a disturbing journey into the American Midwest.
Working as a candy striper in The Dalles Community Hospital in Oregon, 15-year-old Erika Etulain meets Dr. Majij Aziz, a repressed, bullied man from Iran in his early 30s. Compared to the boys in her tiresome junior high school, his maturity enchants her. Rebelling against staunch English parents, Erika rushes into the Iranian doctor’s arms, embarking with him on a road trip to Kansas, entering into sigheh, a temporary Shia marriage, so Majij can have sex with her guiltlessly. The cracks in this taboo coupling are immediate. Majij’s hope to shape Erika into the perfect Muslim wife whom he could take back to Iran is dashed by her rebellious spirit and inquisitive nature, to which he often violently reacts. Waiting for them in Topeka is Majij’s brother Hakim, whose devout fundamentalism demands much of his weak-willed sibling and his new wife. Hutson’s debut will predictably draw comparisons to Lolita, but the novel demonstrates a subtlety of tone and a skillful understanding of interpersonal relationships more reminiscent of Jane Austen than Vladimir Nabokov. The disquieting nature of their coupling is never romanticized, lending the narrative a clever, subdued quality so that otherwise banal happenings—a fart by Majij, an immature, sniping teenage comment from Erika—disturb not only the characters but the reader as well. The drawback to this approach is that the novel’s most important moments and its settings feel overly restrained, even generalized, in their portrayals, blunting emotional or violent outbursts by the characters and ironically making the novel feel its most inert when on the road. Though set before the events of 9/11, and never once uttering the word “terrorism,” the book draws heavily on real-world happenings in 1989, from the influence of the ayatollah to the first World Trade Center bombings, fostering a timely paranoia that addresses, if only superficially, both Islamophobia and fundamentalist Muslims’ fear of Western influences.
An impressive debut that, though it drags a bit in the middle, establishes a constant and ingeniously engrossing sense of discomfort.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-80963-2
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Gilliss Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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