The casual purchase of a cheap copy of the Quran on the streets of Baghdad leads to a shocking discovery and a plot spanning half the Middle East.
When Miami journalist Carlos Lopez discovers an old parchment tucked inside the Quran he buys from a street vendor in Baghdad, he brings it to his friend Professor Prescott for help in deciphering it. Idle curiosity turns far more serious when the professor turns up dead shortly afterward, prompting Lopez to visit Cairo in an attempt to figure out why this document would be motive for murder. He quickly finds himself allied with Cyril Sahani of the Department of Lost and Stolen Antiquities of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture—despite the baroque title, Cyril is frequently armed and is by a wide margin the book’s most interesting character. The two of them—an odd-couple pairing that never quite ignites—embark on a quest that takes them from Damascus to Morocco, with many a stop in between for kidnapping, gunplay and visits to a series of ancient clerics and Quran experts. The mysterious fragment looks to be a lost writing of the Prophet and therefore a potentially world-changing discovery. The pair’s activities don’t go unnoticed—not only are they dogged by the agents of potential buyers, they’re shadowed by secret religious forces intent on preventing their find from ever becoming public knowledge. These secretive forces employ an enormous wrestler and a deadly assassin/Shakespeare buff named Othello Woo who steals every scene he’s in—between jobs ice-picking his helpless victims to death, he laments that there’s so much violence in the world. Unfortunately, Roig’s prose is often too wooden for the excitement of the plot he’s dreamed up. The story is told in the present tense, which is trickier than it looks, but readers will keep going just the same. A thought-provoking, intriguingly religious take on the standard international thriller.
Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456773229
Page Count: 235
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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