Solomita (A Good Day to Die, not reviewed) depicts a New York City where the bad guys are tough, but the good guys are tougher...and make better wisecracks. A woman is found murdered in the back seat of a Mercedes Benz in Gramercy Park. A confession is easily extracted from Billy Sowell, a docile, retarded vagrant. The case is closed, and Billy is incarcerated. Two years later, private investigator Marty Blake sips a Moussy at a bar in northern Queens, hoping to get some answers from Bela Kosinski, a cop who had worked on the murder case and is now spending a besotted retirement swilling vodka. Marty has been hired by a criminal lawyer renowned for his shifting wig and ability to get off the most unrepentant rapists and murderers to gather evidence for his newest challenge: to win the appeal of a wrongly imprisoned man. Marty's ease on the information superhighway and Bela's knack for grilling witnesses make them a good team that quickly discovers Billy was framed. Before they can secure his release, Billy is silenced forever by Tommy Brannigan, Bela's former partner. Unwilling to give up the first real mission of their lives, Marty and Bela set out to find the killer's identity, unraveling a conspiracy by the Manhattan borough president, a Supreme Court justice, and the top-secret Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department, whose spies follow them and bug their homes before resorting to more mortal measures. As the danger increases, their torpid lives are raised to loftier heights, but there is precious little time to prove themselves heroes. The evolution of Marty and Bela's partnership and the meaning it gives to their lives are as touching as any story of romantic love, and when a sober Bela blushes over his new-found ambition, it'll break your heart. Witty, sincere, boorishly sentimental.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-883402-27-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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