Lyrical, ghastly, first-class horror.
Who’d want to miss a rat-ridden backwater southern swamp novel with triplets joined at the frontal lobe to one massive ten-pound brain, each brother with his own identity and yet using the one brain to carry on psychic spitspat with each other?
Three throats, three bodies to be fed, but only one voice, with each triplet speaking one syllable or word at a time: malicious Sebastian, regretful Jonah, and lovewild Cole, who nonetheless at times speaks hideously. Dodi Coots, daughter of conjure woman Velma Coots, has been traded to the family in return for older brother Thomas’s digging screwworms out of the ears of Velma’s cows. Dodi sleeps at the foot of the triplets’ bed and cares for their bedpans and other needs—all rather Faulknerian? Caretaker Thomas tells their story. The triplets and Thomas own The Mill and are the richest folks in Pott County’s Kingdom Come, where they’re cursed and revered; however, their father suicided into The Mill’s machinery—or did he?—rather than face life in their “gorgeous antediluvian mansion,” as it’s described by Sarah, a young filmmaker making a student production about the triplets with her cameraman Fred. In the eyes of God, Thomas was truly married to Maggie, with whom he has never shared a kiss, at age nine, by Drabs Bibbler, a black boy now Thomas’s best friend. Drabs has the gift and epileptic curse of tongues, which always comes over him after twenty minutes with Thomas. Drabs, now 29 with five bastard kids, walks around naked and loves Maggie, while Jonah loves Sarah. And you won’t want to miss the flaming silver dead kid who walks around with skimmer dragonflies and mosquitoes on his eyes and mouth. Or the attic, always a nice place for the dead to snooze. You’ll want to know where the brothers’ lost mother is—and it’ll remind you of “A Rose for Emily.”
Lyrical, ghastly, first-class horror.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 1-892389-58-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Night Shade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
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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