A set of penetrating and absorbing tales.
In Knox’s (After the Gazebo, 2015, etc.) latest short story collection, characters struggle to maintain connections with others despite natural disasters and more mundane circumstances, such as aging.
Haley and her parents hardly have it easy in drought-ridden Toledo, Ohio, in the opening title story. They take family outings to a nearly empty downtown; water is rationed, so Haley’s dad gives her some of his supply despite his own cracked lips. Other tales also feature social units, typically familial, facing menaces that bring emotional torment to the surface. A man named Owen, for example, in “Running Toward the Sun,” is racing to help raise money for breast and reproductive-system cancer research. But an unexpected calamity forces him to face the truth that he’s running from: the fact that his wife, a cancer survivor, has cheated on him multiple times. In “A Perpetual State of Awe,” a woman and her son are stuck inside their home due to a heavy snowstorm, and the abode is at risk of collapsing—much like her marriage. In other instances, families simply strive to stay together; an elderly, troubled couple finds common ground in “The Couple on the Roof.” There are occasional touches of sci-fi, but Knox so adeptly molds her believable characters that the apocalyptic settings seem less surreal. In “Nebraska,” for instance, a small-town woman searches for items in an overcrowded local grocery store that’s full of people who are missing body parts or growing extra ones. The muted aspect of the genre elements mirrors the cautious tone of Knox’s prose: “Houses are being built everywhere, exact replicas of each other excepting the color of the paint, or the direction the garage is facing.” The tales are effectively linked by recurring themes but also by recurring characters—most notably the tattooed loner Rattle, who makes three appearances as part of a doomed relationship (“Don’t Tease the Elephants”); as the father of an estranged daughter (“West on N Road”); and, possibly, on his deathbed (“The Slope of a Line”).
A set of penetrating and absorbing tales.Pub Date: June 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9967779-4-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Hollywood Books International
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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