Inventive and affecting.
Dispatches from the life of a teen mom and budding feminist from the author of The End of Eve (2014) and Bluebird (2010).
“Write what you know, my women’s lit professor kept saying, but what I knew wasn’t shaped like a story and now I was a sophomore and I needed to write an underground feminist classic.” The protagonist, Ariel Gore, is a young woman trying to care for her baby and go to college while battling against poverty, male violence, her mother’s disappointment, and the idea that there is only one way to tell a story. In the short vignettes collected here, she describes childbirth, romantic disappointment, disordered eating, and artistic frustration. Ariel reads Audre Lorde to her baby and casts spells to protect their rented house from ghosts and hateful neighbors. There is no plot as such, and the only connective tissue linking these scenes is Ariel’s singular voice, by turns sardonic and vulnerable. The author has published memoirs already, and the decision to present stories featuring a protagonist with her own name and a recognizably similar biography as “a novel” is a provocative one. Certainly, it provides formal cover for some of the narrative’s more fantastic moments, such as when a blackbird gives Ariel a secret message and when her mother’s best friend turns into a possum and scurries from the kitchen into the backyard. The shape of the text, too, presents a challenge: it’s a concrete refutation of the idea that all stories should have the same outline. This book mimics the messy, discursive texture of memory—of life. At the same time, Gore’s insistence that Ariel is not her makes perfect sense in a book about the construction of an identity. In choosing novel over memoir, Gore is asserting that she is giving us her art, not her self. The themes Gore explores here are not new for her—in addition to writing fiction and autobiography, she was the founding editor of the parenting zine Hip Mama—but the craft and passion she brings to these topics make her second novel a welcome addition to her oeuvre.
Inventive and affecting.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55861-433-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
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