Though the end dips into the maudlin, first-novelist bandele delivers an eloquent message about the tragedy of dreams—and...
A potent mix of familial strife and racial injustice in Brooklyn, by Essence editor, poet, and memoirist bandele (The Prisoner’s Wife, 1999).
Aya’s story begins things: how the 19-year-old is reshaping her life after a year in juvenile detention (a heavy penalty in a case where she was arguably the victim.) The beautiful girl is a straight-A student in college and keeps an early curfew to appease her mother Miriam, a tight-lipped woman who has showered Aya with rules instead of love. When Aya is shot by a white policeman on her evening jog—her hooded sweatshirt similar to a robbery suspect’s—Miriam is left at her daughter’s bedside wondering whether she was all the mother she could have been. Miriam’s own mother, suffering five miscarriages before the birth of her daughter, considered Miriam a miracle and protected her like a relic: Miriam’s life was a warning of what not to do, who not to talk to, how not to think. When Miriam is 16, she meets Bird, a janitor at her high school, newly back from Vietnam. With Bird, Miriam begins to think and feel for herself, and the two begin a secret and chaste love affair. When Miriam’s parents discover the relationship, she must move in with Bird and the loving grandmother he supports. The two build dreams for the future—despite Bird’s Vietnam nightmares and the police harassment he endures, simply for being black in America. bandele’s agenda, via Bird—the inequities of the black soldier, the long history of racial profiling, living with injustice and the effects of that on Miriam and those around her—finds a balanced voice in the short and angry life of Bird Jefferson. While Miriam is pregnant with Aya, Bird is “accidentally” shot by the police, and Miriam switches to emotional autopilot for the next 19 years, until the shooting of her own daughter.
Though the end dips into the maudlin, first-novelist bandele delivers an eloquent message about the tragedy of dreams—and life—deferred.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-1184-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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