Both intelligent and intellectual, this is both a tribute to brilliant teachers and a cautionary tale of their imperfections.
A novel that examines the relationship between the public and shared experience of a lively—even magical—classroom, and the private world of a gifted but flawed teacher.
Largely a character study of Will Silver, master teacher at the International School of France in Paris, the novel advances its narrative through multiple perspectives, much as Faulkner does in As I Lay Dying, one of the texts Will insists his students read. Will is a charismatic English teacher, one of those rare few who inspire a Dead Poets Society–type cult among the seniors in his philosophy and literature seminar. Based on their readings of Sartre, Camus, Faulkner, Shakespeare and Keats, he urges his students to raise questions about the way they live their lives and has them confront their own existential freedom and moral choices. But Will is caught in the irony of his own moral choices when he feels attracted to Marie de Cléry, a student at the school, and begins a torrid sexual relationship with her. Marie is best friends with Ariel, which is to say they have a volatile, love-hate relationship driven both by envy and by jealousy, and it’s clear that Ariel will do anything to pull Will down. While much of the narrative burden of the novel is assumed by Will and Marie, Maksik also provides views of other students, especially Gilad, whose own homoerotic attraction to Will complicates his take on things. Some of the best scenes in the novel involve the reconstruction of the philosophical give-and-take of his classroom, Will’s efforts to get his students to think and to make the literature their own. And despite the administration’s understandable desire to turn Will into a monster who’s preyed upon a vulnerable young woman, he remains sympathetic to the end.
Both intelligent and intellectual, this is both a tribute to brilliant teachers and a cautionary tale of their imperfections.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60945-048-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tonga Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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