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THE VAGRANTS

A complex, downbeat, ultimately admirable tale of a cloaked portion of Chinese history.

A harrowing portrait of a woman’s execution by an oppressive Chinese regime, and how her death affects an entire provincial town.

The debut novel by Li (stories: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, 2005) takes place across a brief stretch of days in Muddy River, a poor town hundreds of miles from Beijing. But the modest setting and short time span belie this rich, expansive novel, which captures the anxieties and brutality of life during the last days of Maoism. In the spring of 1979, a young woman named Gu Shan is scheduled to be executed for protesting the Cultural Revolution. Her parents, Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu, are understandably heartbroken, and Shan’s death has an impact well beyond one household. On the day the townspeople gather in a nearby stadium for the mandated “denunciation ceremony,” we meet a cross-section of residents: Tong, a boy whose self-awareness grows beyond the indoctrination at his elementary school and the abuses of his alcoholic father; Kai, a former classmate of Shan’s who sympathizes with her politics even while married to a doctor eager to flatter party leaders; Nini, a crippled adolescent who’s practically enslaved by her parents; and Bashi, the town know-it-all who courts Nini even while mourning his grandmother’s death. As the story moves along it becomes clear how straitjacketed everybody’s lives are. Moreover, the reader gets graphic glimpses of Shan’s wrecked psyche before her execution and her ruined body after. Yet Li’s story has an empathetic, uncannily graceful tone. It helps that her characters aren’t strictly mournful: Tong has a boyish curiosity, Bashi is appealingly pranksterish, and Teacher Gu is admirably even-tempered, even as he slowly discovers how he was used as a political pawn for much of his life.

A complex, downbeat, ultimately admirable tale of a cloaked portion of Chinese history.

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6313-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008

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THE ALCHEMIST

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

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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