Still, though not as smoothly told as it might have been in the hands of a Vargas Llosa or García Márquez, a good yarn—and...
A one-time vice president of Nicaragua explores dark corners of his nation’s history in this blend of historical novel and noir procedural.
“It was to be a historical novel,” writes Ramírez of the making of his book, which was written and published in Spanish more than 30 years ago, “but also a realist novel, a mannerist novel, a police thriller, a courtroom drama.” Elements of all these run through his narrative, though perhaps with a touch too much emphasis on the courtroom drama part of the mix, which goes on too long without a suitably Perry Mason–esque moment of reckoning (“Please tell the court: Did you take bicarbonate of soda to the room with a glass of water and a spoon to dissolve the medicine”). The premise is transparent enough: in 1933, a young man, an “attractive male specimen,” is both wooing and apparently doing away with some of the most eligible bachelorettes in León, but it’s not really for his allegedly lethal rakishness that he’s in trouble. Hauled to the bench, he affords Ramírez—the winner of last year’s prestigious Carlos Fuentes Prize—an opportunity to satirize Nicaragua’s bourgeois society of the 1930s, which ended in the rise of the Somoza dictatorship. With a few liberties taken, and with a large and diverse cast of characters, Ramírez works with historical fact: there really was a “Casanova killer” of the day, and of course there really was a dictatorship that put an end to the niceties of law—and a dictator who had personal reasons for disliking the defendant, whose story did not end well. Ramírez’s tale, long and diffuse, may be of more historical than literary interest to many readers in exploring a society that was ripe for strongman rule, planting the seeds of the Sandinista revolution half a century later.
Still, though not as smoothly told as it might have been in the hands of a Vargas Llosa or García Márquez, a good yarn—and considering the lack of Central American literature available in English, it enriches a slender library.Pub Date: May 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62054-014-5
Page Count: 502
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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