An American plantation slave loses his gifted yet headstrong son to a harsh whipping in this powerful, compact rush of a first novel. Guyanese poet D'Aguiar (winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Guyanese National Poetry Award) uses first-person narrative, poetry, journal entries, and newspaper editorials to reveal this tale full of twisted beauty. The reader runs to each of these devices like to a new window from which to catch a glimpse of the truth. That slavery is cruel seems to be the message of the first few pages, which describe the emotional scars Whitechapel still bears many years after the death of his son. But deliberate ambiguities make this much more than a catalogue of slavery's devastations. Whitechapel is a dignified man, respected by his peers, and even by his own masters to a degree. But his dignity is that of the good slave. He accepts his lot and made the best of it. His son, Chapel, is secretly taught to read by the master's daughter, falls in love with her, dreams of running off with her, and even tries. But Chapel's father reveals his son's whereabouts to the master with the hope of clemency upon his inevitable capture. Chapel's punishment of 200 lashes kills him. Whitechapel becomes known as a Judas and, eventually, as just a silly old grandfather. But dignified acquiescence and spirited rebellion are strategies that fail blacks equally in this novel, set in the American South in the early 1800s. The plantation owner, part tortured Christian soul and part ruthless slaveholder, is a complex if still inexcusable character. So are the two generations of sadistic plantation deputies. Miscegenation and rape further muddy these waters, and inbreeding ultimately results in oedipally proportioned calamity. A small book with the emotional impact of a wide-screen blockbuster, the reasoned progress of a play, and the painful beauty of poetry.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43962-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
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