Though this is far from a perfect novel, there's enough spark in the first-person narration to make it worthwhile.
A holiday destination for devout Hindus is not as holy as it claims to be in this Man Booker Prize–longlisted novel.
The fictional seaside town of Jarmuli is home to many temples and ashrams, where gurus offer spiritual guidance to Indians and Westerners. The novel opens with a harrowing scene of violence which leaves a young girl orphaned. She's put on a boat to Jarmuli and is taken in by a seemingly benevolent guru. To outsiders, his ashram appears to be a spiritual paradise, but on the inside, there is rampant physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Later, 25-year-old Nomi Frederiksen, the orphaned girl from the beginning of the novel, recalls these incidents on a return trip to Jarmuli, where she claims to be filming a documentary. On a train, she meets three elderly women named Gouri, Latika, and Vidya, lifelong friends taking one last holiday together before Gouri becomes completely senile. These four travelers come across Badal, a temple guide who lusts after an underage boy, and Johnny Toppo, an old tea seller who sings mournful songs to his customers. Helping Nomi with her documentary is part-time cameraman Suraj, a middle-aged alcoholic who happens to be Vidya’s son. The strength of this novel lies in the first-person narration of Nomi, who recounts her tale of loss and abuse in beautiful, unflinching language. Her chapters alternate with chapters told in third person about the secondary characters, which do nothing to move the story forward or shed light on Nomi’s past or the legacy of sexual abuse behind the guise of spirituality in India. Gradually, the various threads lose their energy and fail to come together toward a satisfying resolution. The novel raises questions, certainly, but its refusal to tie things up with a neat bow leaves the ending feeling coy and unfairly ambiguous.
Though this is far from a perfect novel, there's enough spark in the first-person narration to make it worthwhile.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-555-97751-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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