Hill takes time out from his notable series featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe for a longish (448 pp.) tale—first published in Britain in 1987, and very much in the mode of his WW I chronicle No Man's Land—of moral and political compromise, despair, and unexpected love in occupied France. The densely plotted story centers on Gunter Mai, a sympathetic lieutenant in the occupying German army who is obliged to canvass Paris for possible collaborators, and on Janine Simonian, a young woman who is obliged to enlist officially as an informant to the Abwehr in exchange for news about her wounded husband Jean-Paul. When JeanPaul returns to his family, partly amnesiac and transfixed by hatred of the Germans, Janine, drawing away from him, becomes gradually more dependent on Mai; and when her mother-in-law and two children are rounded up in a pogrom, she offers herself to Mai again. Even though she has no secrets to betray and he does not want to use her, they make a second bargain, preventing the children (though not their grandmother) from being shipped to Auschwitz. In the meantime, Jean-Paul has become one of the most flamboyant members of the Resistance; and when Janine and Mai make a third bargain (the children have been seized again, this time in Toulouse), her bogus information coincides with a tip having fatal consequences for Jean-Paul and his colleagues. Hill's account of Janine's collaboration is grimly ironic: she never intentionally gives Mai any information; he is unable to restore any of her loved ones and after the liberation reverses political sympathies; she is branded her husband's betrayer by the very citizens who had been collaborating more fully themselves. A moving, richly textured account of an inhuman military occupation and the all-too-human loyalties it spawns. In Hill's view of war, there can only be losers.
Pub Date: July 14, 1989
ISBN: 0586204539
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Countryman
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989
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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