An evocative but slight fantasy about artists seeking fulfillment through art and faith.
A parable about two young people drawn together by spiritual affinity.
In this short book by Pedersen (Sophia, 2013, etc.), set in a vaguely medieval place and time, an illiterate young man named Metaxaeus, working in a village with his parents and friends, is an instinctively, supremely talented sculptor. He knows “how to take from that fountain within and to soak up its knowledge and then how to communicate this truth through the medium of sculpting stone.” He’s mentored in this skill by a mysterious woman named Maya, who teaches him to “Learn with your whole soul how to carve in stone.” He keeps with him at all times a small sculpture of his own creation—an exquisite miniature bird carved from a jewel, which strikes even his workaday parents as life-changingly beautiful. Another exquisite, tiny sculpture is key to Pedersen’s other main character, a young woman named Akasha who lives in another village and has a nearly supernatural gift for storytelling (“she had learned to plunge deep into herself, and she saw things there, things she imagined that other people did not see”). When Metaxaeus decides to leave his village and travel to the capital city of his region, Pederson works to bring the two together in what turns out to be a lifelong spiritual journey. Overall, the author writes clearly and expressively. For example, the plot’s series of visions and revelations are followed by a cycle of prose poems called “The Stars in the Fall,” which continue the themes of revelation and serendipity that drive the main text (“Wisdom never works without a smile,” reads one typical line, “one which then bequeaths itself joyously to others”). But although the story’s main characters have enigmatic mentors and sympathetic natures, there isn’t much in the way of meaty dialogue. The book’s tone is also occasionally somewhat flat, and it relies too heavily on signs and wonders that may wear thin for readers who aren’t already enthusiastic about spiritual literature.
An evocative but slight fantasy about artists seeking fulfillment through art and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4525-9745-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2015
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
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