A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.
Thorpe’s (Incompetence, 2015) vivid, impressionistic novel about a Westerner’s strange travels around Mali.
Hank Westland, an American convert to Islam, lives a dissolute life in Bamako, Mali, getting drunk every night and bedding a procession of African women. But his mind is elsewhere, far away; in Timbuktu, his friend professor Kati has been accused of sorcery by a Tuareg extremist militant group called Ansar Dine, and he’s being held in a captivity that he may not survive. Westland wants to travel to save his friend, but first he must go see Al Hajj Tidjani, the leader of the Umarian Tidjanniya order that the American has recently joined as a new convert. He arrives at the compound and greets the wily, enigmatic leader, his wives, and their various daughters; their worldview, inspired by idiosyncratic readings of the Quran and the Hadith, quickly begins to challenge his complacency on a variety of issues. As a Christian minister’s son, he’d spent years teaching at a college in the Pacific Northwest, a laid-back, easygoing area where “a bumper-sticker often seen around town read, ‘Mean People Suck.’ ” By contrast, Westland reflects about West Africa, “You lived here in one day more than most people did in twenty years in the U.S.” His experiences in the camp reel wildly from his usual priapism to steep discussions of various Islamic subjects; an in-camp circumcision scene, though, may have every male reader reflexively wincing. Thorpe’s narrative is lushly sensuous, wonderfully capturing the textures and contradictions of Muslim life in Mali and also offering thought-provoking digressions into the nature of Islam (“The true hajj does not mean traveling to Mecca,” Westland learns at one point, for example. “The true hajj is the hajj to the point of mercy at the very center of your spiritual being”). The result is a somewhat jumbled but instantly memorable novel in the spirit of Paul Bowles’ work.
A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-5000-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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