Some memorable detail and wry observations, but capricious character behavior and too many anticlimaxes will frustrate...
Four young lives intersect in contemporary Greece.
Athenian slacker Sid spends days on the couch, heckled by pet mynah bird Maria, and nights in the taverna, where he meets the vaguely Goth girl Julia, his idea of a black-magic woman. They have a desultory affair. Sid’s sister Lia is in an Athens hospital, expected to die of a rare ailment, the exact nature of which her doctor can’t—or won’t—disclose. Her nurse-nemesis, Sotiris, hails from a coastal village and makes frequent visits home, where he stalks a young girl. His quarry is Nina, age 13, sent by her parents to live with her aunt and help out in the aunt’s café. From afar, Nina worships a boy summering in the village with his bourgeois family. A budding writer, she is acutely attuned to her surroundings and condemns other people as “zombies.” She senses she is being followed, and at one point, Sotiris exposes himself to her. Lia asks Sid to get even with Sotiris. Sid, posing as Sotiris’s old school friend Thanási, saddles him with Maria the mynah. Lia sneaks a look at her medical file, and is caught by Sotiris, who slugs her. From then on, he lives in fear she’s going to report him. She’s learned her diagnosis, “Hcnvmb,” a condition, her doctor explains, in which the body’s immune system rallies to fight a non-existent virus. Summoned to the village by Sotiris, Sid/Thanási witnesses the departure of Nina’s crush, Stephanos. Sotiris then enlists him in a failed attempt to “get rid” of Nina. Back in Athens, Sotiris meets Julia, a student physician’s assistant. They get engaged. She notes the strange coincidence of two boyfriends with the same mynah. Shortly after a last visit to Lia, Sid recalls, with odd detachment, the fact that she died alone after he ignored her request to stay the night.
Some memorable detail and wry observations, but capricious character behavior and too many anticlimaxes will frustrate readers.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56656-661-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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