Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction." So says Fowles' alter-ego here. And, if that idea was an undercurrent in The French Lieutenant's Woman (the time-shift narrative tricks) and Daniel Martin (the writer-as-tortured-hero), Fowles is now offering it in undiluted form: this new novel chiefly consists of existential dialogues between a writer and his Muse—along with some Pirandello-ish gamesplaying and an erotic battle-of-the-sexes. Miles Green wakes up in a hospital bed, apparently afflicted with amnesia; soon a lovely doctor and a sexy nurse are matter-of-factly administering therapeutic sex to the outraged patient. What's going on? Is this a farce à la Thomas Berger (with dialogue by Pinter)? Well, not exactly. Because the doctor is suddenly transformed into Erato, Muse of love-poetry and fiction: the hospital scene, you see, was just one of Miles' literary notions. So Miles and his tetchy, pouting Muse then launch into some comic/philosophical discussions, with time-outs for brawling and bedding. The feminist Muse attacks Miles' work; she demands respect ("All I ask is some minimal recognition of my metaphysical status vis-à -vis yours"); she recalls her early days with the Nine Muses ("It was worse than being the Rolling Stones"); she makes suggestions about Miles' career; she confesses to having written the Odyssey. Miles responds with lectures on the modern novel. And, throughout, the tussle between writer and Muse is interwoven with the sexual struggle between Man and Woman: teasing, spats, fights, and—after some more transformation games—happy lovemaking. Fowles, of course, executes his "mantissa" (O.E.D., "an addition of comparatively small importance") with vast erudition and lovely prose bits. But the less characteristic comedy is uneven—from sublime to sophomoric. (Erato confuses lung with Erica Jong.) And, however richly executed, this remains an overextended intellectual vaudeville-sketch—alternately fascinating and tedious, with distinctly special, limited appeal.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1982
ISBN: 0316290270
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
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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