Insightful stories that illuminate the fine line between solitude and loneliness and the limited choices open to people who...
The quiet plains of the North Country serve as a perfect backdrop for Parsons’ moving debut, a collection of short stories whose characters often live deeply solitary, if not always lonely, lives.
In the introductory story, “Hezekiah Number Three,” a young Bangladeshi-American tries to escape the confines of his small-town South Dakota upbringing by going to MIT for college, only to return when his family falls apart. While the reasons for Naseem Sayem’s alienation might be readily attributed to his being the only “caramel-skinned Bangladeshi” in school, Parsons expertly shows how loneliness isn’t only a product of racial tension. In “Beginning With Minneapolis,” for example, Evie Lund Baker finds her marriage to a wheat farmer stifling enough to move to the big city, leaving her husband, Waylon Baker, to tend to the wheat by himself. But Evie is haunted by a sense of disillusionment even in Minneapolis, where she has stretched an interim job “like pie dough across the last eight years.” Now, she “question[s] if she would ever slice through to what was cooking underneath.” Elsewhere, the narrator in the title story, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, attends school at the University of Minnesota so he can get a “clean break in a place where I didn’t own a wisp of history.” But, as the saying goes, you can run but you can’t hide. History chisels these characters’ lives to such an extent that they often become strangers to themselves, having arrived at a station they never envisioned and can’t easily recognize. “Touch is silent,” says a character in “The Sense of Touch.” “And silence is the only way to contemplate infinite things.” The glorious prairie landscape serves to amplify this silence, the starkness a crisp metaphor for the characters’ myriad disappointments. Black Hills National Forest, the endless prairie, even snow-bound Minneapolis—each is a perfect setting for these achingly beautiful stories. Not all Parsons’ characters face existential questions, though; many are just fine moving along with a steely resolve.
Insightful stories that illuminate the fine line between solitude and loneliness and the limited choices open to people who straddle that divide.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988383777
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Aqueous Books
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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