From the author of Exposed (1994), etc.: another tense, slightly out-of-focus personal drama, but this one runs on too long, its effect dissipated by its own relentless intensity. Erin Haley is a popular newscaster in Reading, Penn., who suddenly has an on-air breakdown. She takes a leave of absence to go back to San Diego, where, ten years earlier, she believes that she was raped—or that maybe she raped someone. What she does remember is that she wound up in the hospital afterwards with a broken jaw, and that the man who might have beaten her up is possibly the man who was involved in the rape. In San Diego, Erin retrieves her journals from that time, entries written mainly at a radio station where the fresh-faced college grad had begun as a writer and researcher for a morning on-air team consisting of a sexist, insecure older hack and a talented ex-jock who had also been recently hired by the station. Mazza alternates the ten-year- old journal entries with an ongoing open letter to Kyle, the ex- jock who was somehow involved in the decade-old brutality. The piecemeal journal entries yield clues to what happened, while in the open letter Erin describes a healing affair she's currently having with a married man. This affair frees her to push through and remember what really happened and to go on with her life. Meanwhile, unfortunately, Mazza's precise, clear prose is often at odds with her heroine's chronic uncertainty: ``Half the time I'm not sure what I was talking about in this notebook...'' a typical journal entry begins. And the endless soul-searching grows stale quickly, making what could have been a tight, tense short story seem like an indulgent and unfocused novel. A few well-crafted and moving moments, then, but ultimately tedious and grating.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56689-031-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
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