An impressive segregation tale—not comforting by a long shot but true to its era and an intriguing experiment in textual...
A debut historical novel focuses on racial tensions in the South in 1950.
In this tale, the Horaces, a mixed-race couple, have moved from Chicago to fictional Kidron, North Carolina, because Titus’ Aunt Callula has bequeathed him the 90-acre ancestral homestead, begging him to settle there and keep it in the family. Fifteen-year-old Asa is the couple’s bright and perceptive daughter. The story is told through her eyes, eyes that are being opened to the rigid Jim Crow rules. Titus is a well-educated Black man, former lawyer, and successful writer; Ardene is White and Jewish. To complicate things further, Asa could easily pass for White. Essentially this is a story about social cruelty. The Ku Klux Klan is everywhere; stores and even hospitals are segregated; and with few exceptions, the hoi polloi are viciously and openly racist. Blacks bear the brunt of this, but Jews and other outsiders are barely tolerated. Threats are as pervasive as the weather and as subtle as thunder. The Black community, used to this climate, tries to make the best of it. But Ardene is a natural fighter, determined to start to make things right. Asa becomes deeply involved in a big project to renovate a house into a library for Blacks and eventually helps people “check out the books they want” at the new library. But the idea of Blacks reading is beyond anathema in Kidron, and a heavy price will likely be paid.
Mangel’s dark novel is a very ambitious undertaking and strong in many ways. The typography—left margin justified, right not, as well as artfully broken lines—signals loose blank verse. For most of the book’s 600-plus pages, the verse simply moves the plot along. But when the subject invites it, readers can hear the poetry, rather like a radio signal that fades in and out. For example: “Miss Junetene brings out an oval pie basket, sets / it on the table. ‘Asa, I have some lemon biscuit / for you mama and made them fig biscuit for you pa’ /… /… / The basket has a crisp ruffled trim of forest green / gingham. ‘That’s a pretty pie basket,’ I say.” Although poetry tends to draw readers’ attention to the words themselves and prose to the ideas those words serve, a work like this shows that the gap is not that wide. (Truly lyric poetry might be another matter.) The author delights in descriptions of all kinds, especially food, and delivers some memorable characters, like Virgil Hudson, Callula’s caretaker, immensely strong and kind; Sheriff Noah Emerson, the worst the South has to offer; Henryk, a brilliant Jewish hermit; and Miss Bertie, Asa’s teacher. Asa makes a perfect narrator and protagonist. She devours books that are well beyond her age—including, secretly, her father’s racy mysteries, written under the pen name Ovid White. And she is a useful mix of wisdom and innocence. Asa deals with the tension between sticking it out in Kidron (Ardene’s idealistic stubbornness) and Titus’ growing desire for the relative safety of Chicago. Doing the right thing versus saving oneself is a very hard question, one that should engage every reader.
An impressive segregation tale—not comforting by a long shot but true to its era and an intriguing experiment in textual form.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912477-25-8
Page Count: 664
Publisher: Eyewear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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