A pleasant weekend-getaway read with a quixotic hero and a casual Southwestern flavor.
A Gulf War veteran seeks to expose an 1859 surveying error that allowed Texas to snatch more than a half-million acres from New Mexico.
In his 10th book, Santa Fe author Claffey (Morgan Bluestone, 2013, etc.) tells a plainspoken story. Gordon Meese is a New Mexico war veteran and recreational pilot consumed by the injustice that neighboring Texas, back in 1859, took advantage of an inaccurate geographical survey to stage a territorial “land grab,” helping itself to a narrow strip along the 103rd meridian line that contains more than 600 thousand acres—some of which are now valuable oil wells. (Claffey reproduces the documents in question to show unacquainted readers that this is no mere literary invention.) At one point, Gordon explains: “In my mind, the state of Texas is guilty of violating New Mexico’s border by asserting that no surveying error ever occurred.” Meanwhile, Gordon and a rancher acquaintance, Ty Daggett, are transfixed by a new woman in town, beautiful nurse Alysa Cody, who is working at the local hospital but rudderless after a divorce from her cheating husband. To Gordon, she reminds him of the lost love of his life, who left him for a more comfortable existence in the East. Ty has been a heartsick cowpoke in the 20 years since the girl he adored followed through with her pledge to join a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, convent. Dialogue in this short novel sometimes has a tendency to be baldly expository, and there isn’t a great deal to the plot, as Gordon simply backs off from the incipient conflict of a love triangle to pursue his quixotic cause. Indeed, but for brief mentions of cellphones or the Gulf War (“When boundaries are violated, there are consequences. Ask Saddam Hussein about his violation of Kuwait’s border in 1991”), the lean yet easygoing narrative could have taken place at practically any time during the last half of the 20th century. The tale evinces a bluesy-comic undertone that doesn’t belabor itself with excess folksiness or contrived whimsy.
A pleasant weekend-getaway read with a quixotic hero and a casual Southwestern flavor.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943658-05-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Treaty Oak Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
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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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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