The liberal-minded daughter of American upper-middle-class conservative parents experiences heartache and disillusionment during the Vietnam War era as she moves along a tumultuous course put into motion after she meets and falls in love with a handsome young Frenchman.
In her debut novel, Schiffman brings Joanna Bruckner, about to start her freshman year of college, together with Lucien, who is traveling around the United States playing guitar and making money on street corners. Lucien makes a move on Joanna when he notices she is reading the French-language version of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. In an attempt to establish the pair’s commonality, Schiffman introduces their exchange of French phrases into the text. But the author also strongly implies that the relationship is most likely doomed, which undercuts the tension and suspense; their first evening together, Joanna tells Lucien she believes in free will to make life-altering choices while Lucien responds that he believes in predestination. After separations and painful self-acknowledgment about the nature of their relationship, Joanna becomes involved in an affair with a student of Zen, but ultimately finds no love or consolation with him. She feels she does not have the love of her father, from whom she so greatly desires it. This is brought out in Joanna’s thoughts early in the book, and Lucien says that very thing to her when he makes it clear that she is not the woman who rocks his world the most, even after she surprises him by showing up and staying with him in his hometown of Strasbourg. Joanna comes to a decision about the true meaning of love after a letter bomb—planted in her father’s office because his company produced Agent Orange—seriously injures him. This book, whose evenly paced and well-written action is, however, to a great extent predictable, will take college-educated middle Baby Boomers on a nostalgic trip back to the “crazy Asian war” years of drugs and demonstrations. Schiffman’s colorful descriptions of hippie culture, living spaces and nature evoke images so vivid that the reader will easily see and feel them. A vividly described, if predictable, exploration of an intense era of American history.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460908464
Page Count: 245
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2012
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
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