An adenoidally creepy, affecting debut about one man's mad hunt for the origins of language and the soul. Scottish poet Burnside's bravura performance has everything to do with preeminence of tone. He's a master of the art of establishing persuasive personal atmospherics, based here on the voice of Luke, the precociously anomic and amoral first-person narrator. Effectively orphaned from society on a secluded rural estate in Britain, Luke has been headily influenced by his remote, beautiful mother and left indifferent to his anonymous father, not encouraged by either, while they were living, to consider himself as real kin of anybody. Estranged and yet entitled, he never doubts that he lives at the center of a world. Perhaps as a result, the nature of communication obsesses him. He's fascinated, for instance, by the legend of the Moghul King Akbar's ``Dumb House,'' where chosen children of the empire were sequestered from infancy on, cared for by mute adults and observed to determine whether speech was an inborn or acquired skill. (The conclusion: Acquired.) Appalled by the behavior of the humanity lurking on his own distant periphery and yet seduced by the idea that we may possess a redemptive spirit nonetheless, Luke wants ``to know the soul,'' and so sets out to reproduce Akbar's experiment on a more modest scale at home. The novel successfully raises Luke from the realm of morbid thrill-seeking to the more poignant role of artist gone wrong. Playing god in a series of cruel physical and metaphysical exploits, he recruits humans into his lair but is never himself humanized. The flaw is that all the people here rarely seem wholly real; they live (and perish) in a vaporous, unhappy epic of inflamed and narrowing sky. Still, Burnside's poetry urges us with remarkably few misgivings into his story, which seizes hold of readers like a virus.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-224-04207-6
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Jonathan Cape/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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