An inoffensive, lightweight Christian parable.
Stewart tells the story of a globe-trotting music box in this debut spiritual novel.
Retired sea captain James Calloway is dozing on the beach near his Alabama home when something unusual appears in the water: “As the sun set with reds and burnt orange, in the distance, a wooden box rode the waves.” Calloway inspects the container after it washes ashore: it holds seven antique rum bottles, a Hebrew scroll, and a music box made of gopher wood. What’s more, it’s accompanied by an honor guard of different types of birds that don’t normally flock together. Calloway brings the box home for his wife’s inspection, and she thinks the objects must have survived from biblical times. Each night, when his work is done, Calloway takes the music box and one of the bottles down to the beach. He drinks the heavenly liquid, which allows him to hear the otherworldly music that the box plays. Then he drifts off to sleep, and in his dreams, he travels with the floating box around the world, which washes up on different shores to answer the prayers of people who most need its spiritual power, such as a boy taken from his parents by pirates and a girl suffering from polio. Stewart’s prose manages to capture some of the fairy-tale magic of its story. However, he often repeats words and phrases in a way that robs the narrative of its poetry: “Unlike his father before him, he became cold-hearted over the years. He was not generous with his wealth over the years. He was not passionate about sharing his wealth with his fellow man in need or even helping the poor or indigent who lived in the lower portside of Italy.” The individual stories in the dreams, too, are not always as well-crafted as they could have been, often relying on simplistic narratives and stock characters. However, the novel’s overall structure—with its soothing Gulf Coast framing device and vignettes set in different ports across the globe—is pleasant and compelling enough to keep the reader moving forward.
An inoffensive, lightweight Christian parable.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7791-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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