An eloquent exploration of life seen through an aging man's eyes.
The mysteries of life in a small town are beautifully told through the monologue of an old man’s musings.
Rayfiel has created a poetic world through William, his narrator, who answers questions put to him by a real or imagined, but unseen, questioner about his life and those around him in Conklingville, a town now buried beneath the deep waters of a hydroelectric dam. William imagines the town below, seen through the shimmering, moving water. Rayfiel builds a narrative around the memory of a damaged man. There is no linear storyline; it jumps and stutters, runs into beautiful thoughts and touches on the ugliness of life. William is a throwback to an earlier time: a handyman and a carter who would rather spend time with horses than people. “A horse will take on any mood whatever you feel inside that’s what animals are for they show you what you’re feeling,” he says. And William is feeling much. His family has suffered tragedy—the disappearance of his sister—and the town itself revolves around several mysteries that bring the edgy side of small-town life to the surface. William tries to connect the dots of wayward clues and memories for the man who is asking him questions offstage. Here, the unknown, the unspoken, is as strong a narrative force as the spoken. This novel is unusual in form but beautiful in delivery. Nothing on the surface is what it seems, including the narrator’s vision of God. “See the real book it’s not the bible but us maybe we’re all together one big book…and He’s reading it turning the pages…and we’re just words on a page.”
An eloquent exploration of life seen through an aging man's eyes.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5236-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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