A palatable collection that has some trouble finding its way home.
A trio of self-styled novellas brimming with potential.
Nero’s (Visiting Vincent Van Gogh, 2010, etc.) sparse cast is made up of lost individuals orbiting the fringes and seeking some form of autonomy, real or imagined. “Whatever you are,” suggests one character, “like me, you are an outsider. Outside of your order, outside of society, outside of wherever and whatever it is that you came from.” In The Nun and the Partisan, Sister Vinessa uses a book of mnemonics to create a “mental palace” that offers respite from the monotony of Italian convent life. Her seemingly harmless daydreams take a cerebral turn when she encounters a rebel soldier on the convent grounds and imprisons him in her mind. A dusty campfire tale, Runners in the Night centers on a council of vagabonds debating the existence of the elusive, Atlantis-like city of Barston. When a drifter named Virgil happens upon their camp, claiming to have spent years in that paradise only to be cast out forever, they implore him to share his story. His recollection is filled with enough raw longing to send readers scanning a globe for Barston’s mythical coordinates. Though Vito’s Big Score is the longest story, offering the most in the way of plot, it’s also the weakest of the three. Drawing on the author’s own career as an artist, it chronicles the rise of disgruntled Vito, a painter whose brilliant oeuvre is ignored by the galleries because he doesn’t fit the attractive artist’s profile. He finds a solution in his zealous younger neighbor, Guido, who christens himself Mimo di Modi and passes off Vito’s paintings as his own. As Guido’s fame ignites, Vito finds himself resenting the boy’s self-aggrandizing behavior. Its frenetic dialogue and partially realized characters leave it feeling more like a draft than the former two stories. The novellas excel in their spare, reflective qualities that can feel fablelike, though they read more like a series of sketches than a complete body of work.
A palatable collection that has some trouble finding its way home.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453767481
Page Count: 110
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 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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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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