From the author of the recently acclaimed biography Daisy Bates in the Desert (1994) comes a first novel of beauty and accomplishment, its subject of racial fear and intolerance drawn from Blackburn's own family history. The story is a saga of guilt and suffering that has its start late in the 19th century when a missionary from England comes to an island near Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, ``to stamp out copulation'' (as his son later puts it). What he actually stamps out, however, is the happiness of his family and descendants: The first victim is his own wife, whom he drives cruelly to madness after discovering her having sex with an island native; then there's his own guilt-driven son, suspected of having black blood, who nevertheless echoes his father by taking up a repressive ministry and returning to England; and finally, there's his son, who carries the family's color-guilt and madness deep into the 20th century. The tale itself, however, is only the skeleton of sorrow upon which Blackburn hangs the woven beauties of her own telling of it. Every bit as important as what things happen when are the author's wondrous shifts in time and her deft and inventive intertwinings of image, symbol, and character as they do. Imagine a narrator going into a house in the company of a rather friendly pig; coming upon the narrator's astonishingly old grandfather there; then sitting under a table with the pig as it casually eats a leatherbound book. From one recurring detail to another (the pigor one like it, in earlier timeis the lonely grandfather's boyhood pet), Blackburn evokes the world of 19th-century Mauritius, of 20th-century England, and the terrible sorrows of repression, loneliness, slavery, madness, and lossall with a deftness, confidence, and magic that, by making it joyful, raise tragedy to its uttermost. A rare, wonderful achievement in the novel.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43983-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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