Arenas, sick with AIDS, committed suicide in 1990, but his ``Pentagonia'' sequence (which includes Farewell to the Sea, 1985; Singing from the Well, 1987; and The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990) had been already capped by this dystopian, utterly disgusted little fantasy about life in Castro's dictatorial never-never land. It's a world of Multi-Families, Bureaus of Counterwhispering, Servo-Perimeters, and ever-remindful maxims from the illustrious ``Represident,'' such as ``Memory is diversionist, and must be dealt with harshly.'' People go about their shrunken lives like vermin, with no greater margin of freedom. They breed when instructed to, look only where it is permitted to look, and speak hardly at all. The book's narrator—a high functionary of the regime—moves through this joyless and instinctive existence, sampling its cruelties and repressions as he searches for the repulsive woman who is his mother, whom he has vowed to kill. Arenas has some dark and profound points to make (or remake: a number were already Orwell's or Zinoviev's) about the danger of language to authority, about revolution's insistence on the utility of psychosis (``What we had to do—and this the Represident knows well—was undermine everything, destroy everything that represented balance, that offered a point of comparison, that symbolized stability, that stood in our memories—demolish everything that might have represented the center, coherence, order, a system of values...''). But his matricidal narrator serves both as a monster from within and as a somewhat ironic sexual obsessive; and this blurred focus lends the book (as is the case with so much of Arenas) an hysterical overtone, a whiff of something above and beyond the stench of what it satirizes and full-heartedly hates. Chill but distracted, scattershot.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84066-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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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