Urquhart's third novel (after Changing Heaven, not reviewed) is an engrossing multigenerational tale shot through with passages of poetic intensity and beauty. On Raithlin, a small island off the northern Irish coast, in the mid-19th century, a young woman named Mary is changed forever by a romantic, tragic encounter. A sailor, victim of a distant shipwreck, is washed ashore and dies in her arms. The islanders believe that the youth is Mary's demon lover who has sent her away to the spirit realm, leaving only her physical replica. In fact, Mary moves about in a heightened state of dreamy creativity, consumed by shimmering visions of the sailor, the sea, and far-off lands she has never seen. She finally agrees to marry Brian, master of a local school, who loves her for her otherworldliness as much as for her russet-haired beauty. With Brian, Mary finds a measure of contentment, especially after the birth of their son, Liam. In 1846, however, the potato crops fail and the family is faced with starvation. With a gift from their British landlords, they emigrate to Canada on one of the notorious ``coffin ships.'' They survive the wracking journey and settle on scruffy farmland in the Canadian north woods. In the deep forest, the pull of the other world begins to reassert itself, and one day Mary disappears, leaving behind seven-year-old Liam and an infant daughter, Eileen. Several years later, an Algonquin named Exodus Crow appears, bearing Mary's corpse and explaining the abandonment of her family. Once grown, Liam and Eileen move south to settle on the shores of Lake Erie, where Liam realizes his dream of nurturing the land on a flourishing and fertile farm. In an echo of her mother's doomed romance, Eileen falls passionately in love with a fiery Irish patriot. The devastating consequences include a political assassination and the birth of their love child, who must be raised by Liam and his wife. In chronicling one family, Away celebrates the talismanic power of memory and the possibilities inherent in the lyricism and magic that exist just beyond the edges of reality. A novel that is both literary and accessible.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85504-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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