FerrÇ's second novel in English, and first since her NBA- nominated The House by the Lagoon (1995), creates a colorful family saga as a way to explore the modern political and social history of her native Puerto Rico. The narrator, Elvira Vernet, claims descent from two prominent families whose divergent natures effectively embody contrary strains in the national character. Elvira's mother, Clarissa Rivas de Santillana, grew up among a privileged family made wealthy by its several sugar plantations and given to a dreamlike, contemplative ``faith in inspiration, the importance of aesthetic experience, and love of nature.'' FerrÇ skillfully traces the consequences of the Santillanas' passivity throughout three generations, focusing on the educational and marital experiences of Clarissa and her four sisters (``the five Ledas of Mount Olympus''), all named after their studious mother's favorite literary heroines. The best of their several stories include the continuing romantic misadventures of ``Tia LakhmÇ'' and the betrayal of the devotion to poetry of ``Tia Dido'' (when her literary hero Juan Ramon Jimenez comes to lunch, and the scales fall from Dido's eyes forever). As the five daughters attend the university and their circle of acquaintances widens, the family is gradually drawn toward modern industrialism, leftist politics, the US, and the seeds of their ruin. By contrast, the family of Elvira's father, the Vernets, are dominated by patriarch Santiago (``Chaquito'') and his four sons: bluff, extroverted careerists whose commercial ice-plant and cement factory prosper, placing them in the forefront of Puerto Rico's struggles for independence, though nothing can save them from a destiny of violent conflict, infidelity, and suicide. Moving like a firestorm, the novel throws off subsidiary characters and subplots with too-often confusing and occasionally reckless abandon. It's difficult to absorb all the particulars of FerrÇ's crowded narrative, and to distinguish among her many characters and their convoluted relationships. Still, one admires FerrÇ's ferocious ingenuity and energy as she depicts a society and century in flux. This most demanding of her novels so far is probably also the best.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-14638-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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