A nostalgic swan song about loss, grief, and unexpected connections.
An elderly widow shares her life story with a Ukrainian cab driver as he takes her from Manhattan to the suburban hospice center where she plans to spend her final days.
Carden’s (The Secret Files of Henry F. Sherwood, 2005) novel opens on Christmas Eve as Patricia deGroot Abercrombie, known as Trish, chats aloud to her dead husband. She also has a thing or two to say to her dead lover. Trish has been living alone for decades, mourning those she has lost, and she has chosen this particular day to travel to a hospice on Long Island. Trish climbs into a cab and asks the driver to take her on a tour of various sites throughout the city before her final destination. The driver, Zhelyazko Kowalchuk, tells Trish to call him Ziggy as he attempts to involve her in conversation. Considering her personal pedigree too fine to warrant talking with a lowly taxi driver, Trish continues speaking aloud to her dead loved ones instead. When Ziggy shares that he has also lost his great love and that he copes with PTSD from his time in Vietnam, Trish is disarmed and begins to engage with him. She offers details about her past, taking him on a romp through memories of living large during the 1930s, ’40s, and beyond, as they simultaneously visit locations that hold importance to her. As Ziggy takes Trish closer to the hospice, secrets from her past emerge, and readers will likely wonder if there is a bigger reason that she has landed in this particular cab. Told in the third person, the narrative shifts its focus periodically from Trish to Ziggy, bringing his personal tribulations to the foreground as well. The story is expressed primarily through the pair’s conversation and Trish’s flashbacks, resulting in a preponderance of dialogue and precious little setting details. The emphasis on dialogue creates a lack of physical grounding and causes the tale to feel more like Trish’s hastily assembled memoir than the novel it is intended to be. Even so, the author artfully portrays the equalizing nature of sorrow through the losses each character has suffered and the manner in which it brings two unlikely souls together.
A nostalgic swan song about loss, grief, and unexpected connections.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64438-389-6
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
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
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