More period exotica by the author of such languorous entertainments as Interview with a Vampire and The Feast of All Saints: this time Rice explores the musical demiworld of the 18th-century castrati—those flute-voiced, angelic singers who as boys were "mutilated to make a choir of seraphim, their song a cry to heaven that heaven did not hear." The star of this terrible show is primo Tonio Treschi—but before his entrance there's the sadly common-place history of Tonio's teacher/lover Guido Maffeo, a peasant child, castrated at six for the sake of heavenly music, who loses his voice at 17 but finally settles down to gifted teaching and composition at the Castrati music school in Naples. And it's at about this time in Venice that handsome 15-year-old Tonio, son of the patrician Andrea and young melancholy Marianna, finds his life shadowed and then threatened when he learns that his "dead" half-brother Carlo is very much alive: after Andrea's death, the sinister, disinherited Carlo (who is really Tonio's father!) neatly eliminates Tonio by ordering his abduction and castration. So, forced to announce publicly that this was his own decision to save his beautiful singing voice, Tonio arrives at Guido's conservatory, nearly insane with rage and grief. But on the flanks of Mount Vesuvius he accepts two tasks: a) he swears Revenge on Carlo; b) he will continue to sing up a storm. And later he will ponder his sexual identity with: Guido, a life-long love; gentle feline boys; "masculine" men—including a learned Roman Cardinal; and then the lovely Christina Grimaldi, a painter. Thus, Tonio probes the essence of maleness and femaleness: ". . . if I were part of one or the other or even part of both." And finally it will be Tonio's transvestite allure—he is at last persuaded to take a female role in Guido's opera—that will inch Carlo to his doom. . . in a marvelously shuddering showdown. Rice has convincingly reconstructed performance and training highlights in this era of ornamental vocalization; and the dialogue, assassin-filled plot, and erotica moments all oom-pah away to a splendidly flowery operatic tempo—con amore, con brio, con carnage.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1982
ISBN: 0099471388
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
PERSPECTIVES
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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