Powerful meditation on the destinies of love’s outlaws.
Young Albanian poet probes family secrets and uncovers parallels to his own “affair,” in Spanish author Fortes’s prize-winning novel.
It begins with a gunshot, the possible suicide—or murder—of Zanum, a high-ranking functionary in Albania’s repressive communist regime. Zanum, who met his wife while fighting for Republican Spain, and married her after heroic exploits against the Nazis in WWII, is the senescent patriarch of the Radjik villa, a house resounding with memories. Youngest son Ismaíl hardly remembers his mother, who died of a wasting disease when he was five. At loose ends after his university is closed by the government following demonstrations in which he participated, Ismaíl falls in love with Helena, his brother Viktor’s wife. As they carry on their clandestine affair, Ismaíl is tormented by dreams and recollections of childhood. A mysterious gravedigger informs him that his mother’s body had been exhumed. He seeks out Hanna, the nanny who cared for him and Viktor as children. Gradually, he deduces that his mother, a Spaniard unused to Albanian codes of revenge and honor, was in love with Zanum’s best friend, the family doctor Gjorg. No one has ever explained to Ismaíl the exact nature of his mother’s illness, why Gjorg did nothing to treat her and why Gjorg deserted the family after her death. An informant shows Ismaíl an old archive indicating that an unnamed doctor tried to arrange passage out of the country for four people. The secret service arrested the man, but he was never tried. His medical bag was found with incriminating documents, and the dossier shows the location of his unmarked grave. Zanum reportedly convinced his wife that her only alternative to a political trial was to voluntarily accept slow poisoning with ricin. Finally, Ismaíl understands Zanum’s coldness toward him. When Helena warns that Viktor, also a government official, suspects their betrayal, Ismaíl must prepare for the consequences of 20 years of silent witness.
Powerful meditation on the destinies of love’s outlaws.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-929701-79-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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