Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less...
A small knot of people fight to survive the Nazi siege of Leningrad in a book that feels more like history than it does like a novel.
In the summer of 1941, twenty-two-year-old Anna Levin is staying with her father, Mikhail, at his small dacha outside Leningrad, where Anna keeps watch over her five-year-old brother Kolya. Mikhail is a writer whose lack of political acuity has made him unpublishable; and this failure, along with the recent loss of his wife, has made him into a premature invalid. Anna doesn’t have much drive, either. She watches after the family, does some drawing, takes care of the garden, and, like everyone else, makes sure to voice politically correct enthusiasms for Comrade Stalin so that the men in black vans won’t show up in the middle of the night to take them away. Then, she hears the unbelievable news of a German assault on Russia, and the story begins its lockstep march from the tensions of peacetime to the horrors of war. Despite everyone’s protestations that the Fascists will never get anywhere near Leningrad, the nearer they come. Anna and her family move into the city so as not to be cut off. They are joined in their small apartment by Marina, an actress who fell from political grace years ago and was also a mistress of Mikhail’s; and Andrei, a young doctor who quickly falls for Anna. As the temperature drops, so does hope. The brutal winter makes an already-unbearable situation worse, and soon people are making soup out of bread and water and praying for an end to winter.
Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less of one for releasing the springs of a novel. Still, mixing an easy lyricism with gruesome honesty, she shows us what life is like for civilians in war—praying for help, saving the last crust of bread.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1700-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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