A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.
Hewn out of the brutality of Watership Down and the trenchant ironies of Animal Farm, this is an animal story for adults.
A fable that makes Aesop’s darkest seem saccharine, Italian author Zannoni’s debut novel concerns Archy, a beech marten (a weasel-like animal) inhabiting a stretch of forest with his small family. With a dead father, a harsh, unfeeling mother, and siblings barely able to make their way through the brush, young Archy can only envision a Hobbesian future for himself: nasty, brutish, and short. When his mother sells him as a slave to the mysterious Solomon, a fox who has set himself up as the woodland’s only trader-lender (with the help of his bodyguard/enforcer, a dog called Joel), Archy finds himself receiving many beatings for his clumsy mistakes as well as an odd, intriguing education at Solomon’s hands. Gradually, the marten meets other denizens of the forest and discovers life to be nothing less than drenched in the red of tooth and claw. Growing into a stumbling adulthood, Archy wills himself to learn at Solomon’s feet, to open himself up to the fox’s abusive instruction, which stems from a strange human book, the Bible, which the old trader found years earlier while feeding on the body of a hanged man. In time, Archy yearns to live on a higher, less degraded plane and turns to his painfully acquired writing talents to make sense of the carnage around him. The character of Archy, in all his awkward, vulnerable marten-ness, emerges as courageously as any classical hero. Finding happiness in the arms of a beloved only to have her ripped away, finding stability in the trading post after the death of his master only to be driven from it by interlopers, he is a noble, tormented protagonist striving amid a beastly contingent of the selfish, stupid, and evil. This darkly beguiling novel casts its enchantments with an eye trained on the human heart, with its false chambers and rough, bestial inclinations.
A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377285
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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