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MUSCA DOMESTICA

Name: MUSCA DOMESTICA
Author: Christine Hume
ISBN: 0-8070-6859-4

by Christine Hume ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2000

An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.

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The Barnard New Women Poets Prize was awarded to this first collection of enormously imaginative poems written by the winner of a recent fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center and a grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts. From the deceptively simple title (musca domestica is Latin for housefly) to the poems focusing on such philosophically sophisticated subjects as the meaning of meaning, everyday life is presented as we rarely consider it—skewed and in language and syntax designed to please linguists more than ordinary readers. Hume’s titles intrigue: “Lies Concerning Speed,” “Map Drawn from Memory by My Brother,” “Total Things Known about Motion,” “A Million Futures of Late.” At the same time, the poems themselves are puzzles, the best of them in the simultaneous spirits of Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings (“Didn’t you see it sky the sum?”), the least simply confusing, as if the speaker were caught in a world in which all images were surreal (“I shuffle layers of pulp / feathering gossip”) and most syntax was arranged as if to duplicate that of a foreign tongue. Some poems contain striking, meaningful ideas or images (“Because the unadorned always subject the adorned to their proofs”; “from a rock jetty / five monks ease their hems / into the river”), but a reader must wade through too much weedy language to reach these few brilliances. In one of the collection’s most successful poems, “Articulate Initials,” Hume fantasizes actual lives within the illustrations surrounding illuminated letters. Here her description remains singularly focused, with the fine result that she reaches unexpected but earned epiphanic conclusions. Too many poems in the book offer only dispersed images and so many of them per poem that any luminosity is diluted.

An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.

Pub Date: April 21, 2000

ISBN: 0-8070-6859-4

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.