A flawed novel, but its charismatic protagonist may win readers over nonetheless.
An epic fictional account of an immigrant family’s settlement in the United States, as told from a little girl’s perspective.
Cyrella’s parents are both Russian Jews who fled their native country at the turn of the last century to elude persecution. They land in Saskatchewan, Canada, where her father, Max, owns and operates a general store. Eventually, he sells the business, moves the family to an apartment in Brooklyn, and immediately struggles to make ends meet. In a fit of desperation, he opens up a tailoring business in yet another brutally uncomfortable tenement. Max and wife Rosie have two sons (although another six die) and Cyrella, who becomes the primary protagonist of the story; her all-too-gradually blossoming maturity in some ways mirrors the family’s struggle to fully acclimate to new environs. Cyrella is both precocious and guileless at the same time, stunningly adept when it comes to bookish or artistic endeavors but painfully shy, even childish, when it comes to matters of the world. Early on, she suffers two sexual traumas that may have contributed to this stunted development, but the narration never directly ties her later struggles to these ordeals. Her love of learning is insatiable and sophisticated, though: she has a particular fondness for movies and books and discovers an enthusiasm for theater while away at summer camp. Her immaturity, accentuated by her diminutive stature, complicates her budding romantic longings. Finally, she meets an aspiring doctor and for the first time love seems unconfined to poetry and dreams. Author Landis has a background in poetry, which often shines through in the polished prose of her debut novel. At times, it reads like a series of disconnected anecdotes, and real tragedy, such as the suicide of Cyrella’s Uncle Herschel after he loses his life’s savings in the stock market crash of 1929, are given short shrift. Also, the book ends with an inexplicable abruptness, making it feel unfinished. The writing is undeniably charming, however, as is the main character.
A flawed novel, but its charismatic protagonist may win readers over nonetheless.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-7960-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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