Brilliant.
Top-flight fiction keeps arriving from Canada with remarkable frequency these days. This time, the high standards set by Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, and others are matched—and then some—by a dramatic first novel from an award-winning Ottawa journalist and short-story writer (Small Change, 1997).
In stunningly precise and suggestive prose, Hay tells a story of obsession and rivalry neatly summarized at the start: “Two sisters fell down a well, and the well was Maurice Dove.” The two are 17-year-old Lucinda Hardy, a virginal blond, dutiful daughter, and her eight-year-old sister (and, in every way, opposite) Norma Joyce, who live with their widowed father Ernest on his remote farm in Saskatchewan during the drought-ridden late 1930s. The rather more opaque Maurice is an itinerant botanist studying western Canada’s resilient prairie grasses—as well as the weather patterns that have exacerbated the harshness of these Depression years—and a handsome, enigmatic presence who arrives, rather like Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, at the Hardy farm during a blizzard. He immediately attracts both Lucinda’s shy adoration and her sister’s precocious sexual urges, and will leave, then reenter their lives several more times in the course of a narrative that covers 40 years and moves from Saskatchewan to Ottawa and thence to New York City in the 1970s. Hay’s yearning, suffering characters have the lit-from-within emotional intensity of D.H. Lawrence’s; indeed, Women in Love comes to mind, as the rivalry between the sisters grows and alters unpredictably, and the wrongs that the aggrieved, ego-driven Norma Joyce has committed come to haunt her memory and conscience, while paradoxically fuelling (even as they inhibit and qualify) her development as a visual artist. All this against a richly realized background in which landscape, weather, and work routine are seen—quite convincingly—as shapers of both character and fate.
Brilliant.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-123-X
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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