The sixth semioccult in the Nicholas Linnear series dances between generations, summons up characters from earlier novels, and deals with time past almost like Proust. Nietzschian superman Mick Leonforte murders the brutal Vietnamese husband of gorgeous Giai Kurtz, then in a Tokyo restaurant shows Giai the black Damascus steel blade with which he dispatched her husband for her. ``Dipped in a bottle of Chateau Talbot '70, his favorite wine and vintage,'' he tells her. Yes, the East!—where life can be sped to oblivion with great style. Mick heads an American Mafia family bent on wresting control of the Japanese underworld from Mikio Okami, Kaisho of the Yakuza (The Kaisho, 1993; Floating City, 1994) and the elderly great personal friend of Nicholas Linnear, whose father, Colonel Linnear, with the US Occupation Forces back in 1946, helped Okami get the Yakuza on its feet again by establishing the black market and also came between the rival Mafia forces of the Leonfortes and the Mattaccino family. Today, Black Paul Mattaccino carries on a half-century rivalry with the Leonfortes and the Yakuza. Why did Colonel Linnear help the Yakuza? Because the underworld is the keel of Japanese society and keeps the government and big business in balance. Now, Nicholas's Japan-based Tomkin Industries is helping Japan launch the TransRim CyberNet, based on his secret cellular phone that transmits astoundingly clear pictures of the speakers, can do a half-dozen other operations, and will monopolize Japanese electronics industries. But someone has been stealing the secret CyberNet data, and Lew Croaker, the detective with a biomechanical hand, returns to help Nicholas. The rivalry between generations climaxes with its birth back in the late 40's when John Leonforte, his crushed face remade by plastic surgery, becomes Leon Waxman but is outwitted by Colonel Linnear during the blackmailing of a McCarthy-like senator. As Lustbader creates a complex, giant microchip of a story, mere human readers enjoy sunrises of sexbliss and move like deathproof titans through a plot that bounces like a pinball from Tokyo to New York to West Palm Beach. Vacation fun.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-86810-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
PERSPECTIVES
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