A spare but affecting novel about love and war during the restless decades.
Two girls, entranced with each other and hopelessly intertwined, grow up in the political chaos of Greece.
Another fine entry in the University of Rochester’s Open Letter series of literary translations, this cerebral novel by prizewinning novelist Michalopoulou (I’d Like, 2008, etc.) recounts a friendship of the kind that marks us for life. Maria is just a child in the late 1970s when she's uprooted from the home she treasures in Nigeria and returns with her parents to crowded, unstable Athens. Her life is changed forever when she meets Anna, an angelic-looking classmate who is also a refugee, albeit from vogue Paris and not the wilds of Africa. Anna is a strange creature whose outer beauty disguises a passionate, ruthless and politically volatile mind. The novel tracks their unpredictable relationship through their adolescence in the 1980s to one character's untimely end (though it should be fairly obvious that the provocative title—Maria’s chosen title for the novel she imagines writing about Anna—is metaphorical rather than literal). It does take decades for Maria to see past Anna’s many betrayals, childish tests and impulsive leaps into their country’s radical politics and take her for what she really is. Here’s a notable moment in Maria’s blooming self-awareness: “I’m beginning to understand the mechanism behind her charm: she does something insane, something out of keeping with her beauty, her image, the way she dresses. Then she uses that conspicuous act like a blanket: she wraps herself up in it, becomes that act. In the eyes of others, Anna is an allegory for generosity, courage, resourcefulness. She does things that occur to other people only fleetingly, enacts scenarios from the realm of instinct. She charms, she torments, she curses, she kills.” A deft translation from the Greek by Emmerich helps Michalopoulou bring this emotional love-hate relationship to life.
A spare but affecting novel about love and war during the restless decades.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-934824-74-0
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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