A powerful evocation of mental torment and ecstasy.
A 25-year-old woman, artistically gifted and mentally unstable, chronicles her childhood in Turkey; her sojourns in Europe; her loves and torments as she repeatedly descends into the underworld of mental institutions and reawakens, almost miraculously, to the fragile beauty of nature and of human connection.
This intensely felt novel—originally published in Turkish in 1980—opens conventionally enough in the 1950s with elegiac scenes of childhood, wonderfully evoked, and a portrait of a provincial Turkish town that seems to materialize before our very eyes. “The boulevard that starts at Saraçhanebaşi goes as far as Edirnekapi,” the narrator writes. “In the middle is a wide footpath bisected by a row of oaks. Red and green trams run along either side.” The family is brilliantly conjured, too. “It’s been seventy years since she last slept with a man,” we learn of one elder. “She loves life. Nothing interests her more than her own funeral.” School days feature nuns that emerge daily, “heads downturned, dark clouds in the dim morning light slipping one by one down the steep stairs into the deeper darkness of the nunnery.” The narrator’s depiction of her descent into mental illness, a recurring affliction, forms the core of a novel that nonetheless defies gravity thanks to the graceful clarity of the author’s epigrammatic style and the omnipresent dark humor. “I shall learn to lie down smiling for electric shock treatment,” she writes of her many hospitalizations. “If I wish to save myself, that is.” And later, she notes that “nights come early to this hospital. But they don’t know how to end. Dawn never comes.” Time and place become unstable here. One moment the narrator is in Berlin or Paris, acquiring a series of lovers who become discarded husbands and recording her sexual experiences with pithy, almost clinical accuracy. Then it’s back to Ankara, where the political upheavals of the 1970s fleetingly penetrate this profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance.
A powerful evocation of mental torment and ecstasy.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781945492693
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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