A dying academic, an oblivious house husband, a self-centered Southern writer, and a grieving ex-editor suffer much angst in Godwin's (Father Melancholy's Daughter, 1991, etc.) latest domestic drama — a meditation on marriage in which the prose is always supple but also more than a little dull. Haughty 58-year-old Magda Danvers, an English professor who's still resting on the laurels of the one book she published decades earlier, is holding court from her deathbed, and a gaggle of academics — suck-ups, gossips, parodies all — pay their respects. Magda calls her ovarian cancer her "Gargoyle" and the last months of her life her "Final Examination." As she decays, she is waited upon by her husband, Francis Lake, who is 12 years her junior and gave up the priesthood for her. For 25 years Magda has earned the money while unambitious, nonintrospective Francis has kept house and contented himself with basking in her limelight. Alice Henry, whose baby has just choked on his umbilical cord, finds a peculiar solace in Magda's sickroom. Passive-aggressive Alice can't stomach her novelist husband, Hugo, who's 16 years her senior, and wonders if perhaps she married him because she was in love with his writing — after all, she was his editor. As she becomes closer to Magda and Francis and ponders their unlikely union, she falls in love with Francis, who seems totally unaware of her intentions. Hugo, meanwhile, baffled by Alice's hatred, is fighting off writers' block and learns, to his dismay, that his son from a previous marriage is gay. As each undergoes a self-reckoning, Hugo compares the stages of writing a novel with the stages of a marriage, and Magda, referring to a poem by Donne, welcomes death as her "good husband." Godwin is more enamored, and convinced, of Magda's and Hugo's brilliance than her readers will be. Polished, often incisive, but pompous and obvious as well; with none of the bracing acuity of Sue Miller's For Love, which also put relations between the sexes under a microscope. Particularly disappointing for a novelist of Godwin's stature.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-37243-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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