Filloy, as translator Riley notes, is scarcely known in Latin America, much less the English-speaking world. This beguiling...
Obscure in its native Argentina, a grand modernist novel finds new life in a vigorous translation.
In Spanish, a caterva is a crowd—just a bunch of people crammed into one place. As Filloy’s novel opens, we find an assembly of drifters under a highway bridge, “not clustered in a heap like stones and boulders that just come rolling randomly along…but rather washed there by virtue of a secret current.” Grumbling about the surroundings and the smell, the lowering clouds smelling, in Filloy’s striking image, like sex, while the wind blows like a “swarm of flies,” the feeling is more Beckett than Joyce, the latter being the modernist to whom Filloy is most often compared. The tale soon explodes beyond even these messy confines, as Abd-ul “Katanga” ben-Hixem—for so one of the wanderers is named—and companions, who, it turns out, have a more political purpose than we might have originally thought, scatter across an aoristic landscape, anarchistic gentlemen of the road. (“Neither drifters, sir, nor lousy,” Katanga politely tells the menacing constabulary.) The novel is very much of its time, born in 1937, which is attested to by some of its references (to fascism, Nazi spies, and that newfangled thing called a Swiss army knife); but as it swirls into allegory, something like a mashup of Cervantes, Bulgakov, and Pynchon, it becomes exuberant in its strangeness: “Oh, the victory of superimposing organic full-frontal nudity, with neither briefs nor maillot, upon the mockery of well-catalogued social perversions!” Ever more hallucinatory, with visions of the heads of South America’s presidents shrunken “to the size of a fist,” Filloy’s big shaggy dog of a tale defies easy description: it’s odd, allusive, and satirical, and it’s also a lot of fun.
Filloy, as translator Riley notes, is scarcely known in Latin America, much less the English-speaking world. This beguiling yarn merits him many new readers.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-036-4
Page Count: 375
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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