This inordinately ambitious novel by the Russian ÇmigrÇ author (The Winter’s Hero, 1996, etc.) flies off in so many directions that few readers will be able to focus clearly on its intermittent considerable strengths. It’s the picaresque history of singer-actor Alexander “Sasha” Korbach’s 13-year (1982—95) odyssey in and out of favor with Soviet authorities, pursuit of the good life in America, and lifelong search for a personal aesthetic—a “new sweet style” compounded of abstract universal and mundane specific elements, as was the dolce stil nuovo Dante created for his Vita Nuova. Aksyonov tells Sasha’s often beguiling story in a distractingly avuncular voice that addresses the reader directly and indulges in arch metafictional play with fractured allusions to his own early novels. And the story is heavily laden with commentary: on Soviet paranoia and deceitfulness and the (not dissimilar) rot at the core of American culture, more specifically on the breakup of the Soviet Union (clearly paralleling Korbach’s own travail) in the 1990s. Still, Aksyonov’s ego-driven antihero is an engaging bundle of sexual and creative energies, and the parade of characters orbiting around him—his enthusiastically Americanized ex- wife Anisia, fellow Russian-Americans like Bellovian hustler Tikhomir Barevyatnikov and sexual gameswoman Lenore Yablonsky (who compiles an “impressive record of missions behind the lines in the American sexual revolution”), and especially Sasha’s American mistress Nora Mansour (note the surname) and her father, his “fourth cousin,” department-store millionaire philanthropist Stanley Korbach. They all have their own unruly reality, and help broaden the novel’s scope. The details of Sasha’s several careers—as filmmaker, professor, and “chairman of the Moscow branch of the Korbach Fund”—are also cunningly manipulated to bring the story to an absolutely stunning comic-apocalyptic conclusion in Jerusalem. Not an easy read, or a fully successful novel, but a piquant, flinty book brimming with provocative ideas and characters. Aksyonov’s fiction is well worth the effort it demands.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44401-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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