A lightweight but feel-good parable for fans of angel-encounter stories.
A short tale about a man whose life is changed by a mysterious encounter at the foot of a mountain.
Joseph, the narrator of this short novella by Johnston and Ben, is sitting atop a mountain when he’s struck by a series of sudden realizations: life is short; the meaning of existence, murky; the universe can often seem unfair (“What was fair about someone living ninety years and having a great life, while someone else died early from childhood cancer?”); and he’s been ignoring all of these concerns too long. He feels a new clarity as he hikes back down the mountain, but alarming physical symptoms quickly overtake him. He’s feeling terrible when he reaches the bottom and encounters a stranger who calmly informs him he’s having a heart attack but also reassures him: “Everything happens for a reason and everything will work out.” His friends and girlfriend rally around him, and although he’s initially depressed, he survives. When he’s recovered enough to return to the mountain, Joseph seeks out the mysterious stranger in hopes of gaining insights he’s sure the man possesses. And he’s not wrong. He meets the same man, and for the remainder of the novella, the stranger teaches him about meditation, reincarnation (“Creation is precise….If you shoot and kill someone, you will be shot and killed”), and the true nature of Christianity. Their eventual parting is calm but final, and Joseph is left to ponder everything he’s learned and come to some fundamental breakthroughs of his own (he realizes that “knowing God and deepening your relationship with Him is all that matters”). The combination of Christianity and Eastern mysticism that Johnston and Ben present here is intriguing though somewhat underdeveloped; Joseph never experiences any serious doubts about the stranger, and the stranger never hints as to why Joseph would be singled out for such an extraordinary visitation. Both Joseph and his mysterious instructor have a tendency to talk in clichés, and despite his assurances to the contrary, Joseph isn’t radically changed by his supernatural experiences. The story’s pace, however, is quick enough to keep many readers’ interest.
A lightweight but feel-good parable for fans of angel-encounter stories.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1491755235
Page Count: 58
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 20, 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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