There are spasms of brilliance, but too much of this book reads like a private joke—good if you’re in on it, less good if...
Postmodern novelist REYoung (Unbabbling, 1997) returns with a madcap, shaggy dog tale set along the U.S.–Mexico border.
Throw Under the Volcano into a blender with Cat’s Cradle, Finnegans Wake, Pedro Páramo, and the collected works of Charles Bowden, and you have something approaching REYoung’s latest. His borderland is a Trump-ian dream, cleaved by a wall 20 feet tall: “Black, impassive, impassable, it stretched into infinity in the east and in the west.” Yet the desert is an odd thing here, with waist-high snowdrifts in the place of sand dunes, crisscrossed as ever by the Border Patrol, smugglers, and other intruders in the silence of the wasteland. One of the more loquacious of them is Margarito, tutor to an odd character named the Snowman, who is in this hot yet snowy country for reasons that seem to have something to do with a movie directed by a Sam Peckinpah reincarnation named Boone Weller. Is Snowman really a method actor named Billy, a scandal back in Hollywood hot on his heels, or is he someone else, or is the whole shebang a grand and glorious hallucination? Judging by some of the characters’ diets—one, Young writes, possessed of bloodshot eyes “infused with hydrocarbons, THC, methamphetamine, nicotine, malt liquor, Ice”—the possibilities for the last are quite real. And as for the capitalized Ice, well, there’s a reason the desert is white and that the character is named Snowman. Young exults in language, sometimes to the point of indiscipline; the storyline, opaque to begin with, is often buried in sheer verbiage. Often he hits on some nicely philosophical aperçus and mots justes—“Does God feel sorrow and remorse for all the little tortures he she it has devised for us…?” “everyone was rolling up joints, spliffs, fucking industrial-sized marijuana smokestacks, everybody laughing and talking manic stoned bullshit”—but just as often the yarn staggers under the weight of its own cleverness.
There are spasms of brilliance, but too much of this book reads like a private joke—good if you’re in on it, less good if not.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978162891446
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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