Much like a dream itself: a novel that eludes definition, makes little sense, and is quickly erased from memory.
Man gets attacked on train, goes into coma, wakes up—or does he?
Though British author Garland started out writing cinematically inspired, densely layered backpacker fiction like The Beach (1997) and The Tesseract (1999), his newest goes for something more terse, more abstract, and, ultimately, less interesting. Carl is taking the tube home late from work, still penning marks on some papers he’s carrying—a manuscript? legal documents?—when a gang of toughs gets on and starts harassing a girl who tries to get away from them by sitting closer to Carl. They follow, Carl intervenes, and next thing he knows he’s getting the holy hell knocked out of him. As “a remote viewer,” Carl watches his body in the hospital, the nurse who seems overly interested, his girlfriend/secretary, and pretty soon himself waking up. Not long after he’s supposedly rejoined the waking world, it becomes apparent to Carl that things aren’t the way they should be. While his life still seems to retain the basic parameters that he remembers—his girlfriend, his best friend Anthony—other details aren’t so reassuring. There’s that problem with vast swathes of time slipping away from him, and then the waking up covered in blood-soaked bandages, even though he can’t find a wound to have caused the bleeding. Carl figures out, long after the reader has, that he’s likely still in a dream-state, that no matter how many times he may think he has woken up, he’s probably still dreaming, as everything has that slippery, indescribable feel of dreams. But The Twilight Zone this isn’t, and Garland’s desire to pare his writing to the essentials hasn’t left much for the reader to grab on to. The blank march of pages is broken up by 40 block prints (by the author’s father, a well-known artist) but little else of interest.
Much like a dream itself: a novel that eludes definition, makes little sense, and is quickly erased from memory.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 1-57322-273-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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