Vega Yunqué is a potent talent, but this effort needed stringent editing—and, possibly, hormone reduction surgery.
Vega Yunqué revisits the busy NYC Lower East Side Puerto Rican–American site of No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent (You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again), 2003.
This equally raucous outing focuses initially on the eponymous Omaha, a 35-year-old failed NYU theater major and would-be filmmaker with green-dyed hair who’s been fired from his nothing job at Kinko’s and suffers continual sexual frustrations occasioned by his notorious genital shortcomings. Enter 15-year-old Maruquita Salsipuedes, the borderline-illiterate inheritor of the sorcerous powers brandished by her family’s powerful women brujas (i.e., witches)—who decides Omaha’s “the one,” takes him in tow, and orchestrates a “Ceremony of Enlargement” that makes him unfortunately irresistible to many, many women. Vega Yunqué’s lavish comic imagination fills the narrative with wonderfully offbeat characters: Maruquita’s formidable mother, Flaquita, whose walkup apartment in the Loisaida ghetto contains within itself a lush South American jungle; her brother Samuel Beckett Salsipuedes, enriched by Internet stock trading and working on an enigmatic postmodernist play; Kinko’s communistically devout day manager, Valery Molotov (“stay in progressive groove, dude”); and the several beneficiaries of Omaha’s serial impregnations once the news of his new endowment gets around the ’hood. Vega Yunqué makes it all work for nearly 200 pages as his characters hold forth in hilarious broken Spanglish, Maruquita shapeshifts and makes “magical-realist” mischief, and Omaha resumes his abandoned film career and conquers new horizons—notably and fatefully, WASP princess Winnifred Buckley. But the novel collapses into metafictional mannerisms as Vega Yunqué inserts his opinions into the text ad nauseam, concocting fantasies of uptight rightwing America vs. ethnically vital Latino culture. Even a vivid, wry, tragicomic ending can’t save this one from its own preening excesses.
Vega Yunqué is a potent talent, but this effort needed stringent editing—and, possibly, hormone reduction surgery.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-630-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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