Not Makine’s best; still, a worthy lyrical addition to his Proustian tapestry depicting a vanished country’s deeply...
The legacy of a century of geopolitical conflict is analyzed with a tad too much discursive insistence in this otherwise resonant, richly plotted, and quite moving fifth novel from the Russian-born (French-language) author (Dreams of My Russian Summers, 1997, etc.).
The narrator, whose identity is (appropriately) at first concealed from us, addresses a likewise unidentified woman as he describes various events in his family’s past—returning repeatedly to the image of “a child hidden in the mountains of the Caucasus” and being carried away from danger by a white-haired woman. As his narrative loops forward and backward in time, we learn that the narrator had been a battlefield doctor treating casualties in Afghanistan and other “small wars,” and subsequently was employed to monitor the activities of freelance arms dealers—presumably as a KGB agent during the Soviet Union’s chaotic final months. The parallel (earlier) story that emerges from his exchanges, with the aforementioned confidante, of “long underground passages of our remembered past” builds an even more graphic and gripping picture of a family involved in several generations’ political and military struggles: from an independent villager’s resistance to Red Army tyranny in the 1920s to his son’s hallucinatory years of service on WWII battlefields to the narrator’s climactic pursuit (related in convincing espionage-thriller fashion) of the double agent he blames for the death of the woman he had loved. The story’s meditative romantic tone and fragmented structure make comparisons with Ondaatje’s The English Patient inevitable. But Makine’s is a lesser work: a lament for the carnage spawned by nationalistic frenzy and sheer human folly that’s too often explicitly preachy, and elevated by spectacularly suggestive images (a starving, riderless horse tethered to a tree; “the eyes of a woman, large and sorrowful . . . [captured in] a fresco blackened by fire”).
Not Makine’s best; still, a worthy lyrical addition to his Proustian tapestry depicting a vanished country’s deeply conflicted past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-571-X
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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