A spare, sharp-boned bird of a novel, whose song is wrenchingly sad yet full of indomitable spirit. Astley (The Slow Natives, 1993, etc.) writes of old age, of life slipping past and freedom lost, and of loneliness. As Kathleen, dozing and daydreaming her way into decrepitude and oblivion, looks back over her life, the ``pictures came in savagely illuminated splats,'' edged by disappointment and unnameable desire. The setting is Australia, but the vast emptiness surrounding Astley's characters is a symptom of psychology rather than setting. Kathleen recalls her marriage: ``seeking the idyll yet somehow missing it...Solitariness nibbling away even in the middle of parties, dances, pillow-talk.'' Her husband, ``a tensed sales clerk with the distant crazed eyes of a visionary unable to satisfy his yearnings,'' disappeared into the jungle, searching for his ``new Jerusalem,'' then succumbed, quite willingly, to cancer. Then there were—and are—her two children. The monstrously selfish Shamrock (Sham) took a year off to find herself (`` `Where will you look, dear?' Kathleen had asked mildly'') en route to fulfillment as the wife of a crooked politician and hostess of opulent dinner parties. The somewhat less monstrously selfish Brian (Brain) is miserably married, miserably adulterous, and prone to quoting Tennyson over his breakfast bran. Kathleen—except when available to baby-sit—has become nothing but a burden, a threat to her children's cherished, illusory liberty. When Sham dumps her unceremoniously in a retirement community called Passing Downs, Kathleen makes one last dash for her own freedom. ``It's time to go feral,'' she announces to a stranger. ``Tribes of feral grandmothers holed up in the hills, just imagine it, refusing to take on those time-honoured mindings and moppings up after the little ones while the big ones jaunt into the distance.'' Astley is a marvelous writer and a hilarious, merciless, and poignant truth-teller.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13966-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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