Are you wishing for a wry, sly book about the human comedy? Wish granted.
Outsized egos take a shellacking in nine crafty, contemporary tales about vanity and the titular “idiots” who succumb to it.
In each of the first five stories, a fairy appears, hovering just inches above the urban German turf where, in succession, five hapless narcissists—an ad executive determined to salvage his firm; a young film director frightened of his own brilliance; a mother jealous of her famous son; a hack writer disgusted by his commercial success; an alcoholic know-it-all desperate for recognition—bemoan their plights and are in turn offered the granting of one wish. Although the fairies vary from tale to tale (several are cranky, another is a newbie recently promoted from shooting-star service), they all stick to the rules: one wish only, no wishing for more than one wish, while wishes for immortality, health, money and love are verboten. It’s a thankless job. Each grantee quibbles with the rules (denied immortality, the director asks for at least 200 years), dismisses the fairies’ suggestions (insulted by the offer of a dishwasher, the mother says she ran a left-wing record store for 28 years and washed dishes by hand all her life), misunderstands what the fairies are offering (the alcoholic asks for four Alka-Seltzers) and inevitably wishes for something that yields un-wished-for consequences. The conceit works, but the four closing stories are even better. In these, German novelist Arjouni (Magic Hoffman, 2000, etc.) shifts his creative talents and humor into overdrive, with results as smooth as an S-Class Mercedes on the Autobahn, as when a wannabe novelist, by recounting his plot, winds up lulling to sleep a bank robber who’s holding him hostage at gunpoint; or when a famous director pays a hitchhiker to pose as his long-lost writer-friend at a party, where, when another guest inquires what genre he writes, the imposter responds, “Holy Scripture.”
Are you wishing for a wry, sly book about the human comedy? Wish granted.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59051-157-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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