With spare, lean prose, British novelist Edric (The Broken Lands, 2001, etc.) creates a haunting and disturbing meditation...
A despairing portrait of humanity as it exists on Britain’s Fenland coast at the end of WWII.
Concealed in the dunes, James Mercer watches as 15-year-old Mary Lynch walks the shores of the Fens in the summer of 1946. The moment is significant. Mercer spends much of this somber tale carefully observing the inhabitants of a small village and the workers who have come there to dismantle, under his supervision, gun platforms built during the war. Mercer also studies, then becomes engaged with two men: Jacob Haas, a Dutch Jew and concentration camp survivor mourning the loss of his sister Anna; and Mathias Weisz, a German soldier captured at Normandy by the British. Regarding their experiences from his home in a tower at the edge of an abandoned airfield, Mercer realizes that life in this “wasteland” during peacetime will scarcely differ from their desperate existences on the continent during wartime. In trenchant dialogues, Mercer and his acquaintances look to the dark past and the bleak future. Haas, in failing health, recalls sadistic and harrowing camp incidents, one of which took the life of his sister. Weisz remembers the dissolution of his home. Mercer gradually becomes more actively committed to the lives around him. He moves to defend Lynch from her crude, bullying father and to protect Haas from the violent anti-Semitism of workers who fear the loss of their jobs and the inevitable dissolution of the village, which Edric renders in stark images. Seeking refuge from an angry mob, Weisz and Haas again find themselves in hiding; the postwar period brings no significant change or improvement to their lives. The war, Mercer observes, “still clung to everything it had once touched.”
With spare, lean prose, British novelist Edric (The Broken Lands, 2001, etc.) creates a haunting and disturbing meditation about an empty, abandoned world passing through a meaningless transition.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-552-77206-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Swan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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