A cerebral study of self-absorbed women that never dares to question its own artistic pretensions.
A half-successful debut focusing on three very different women and the family ties that keep them together despite their outsider status in three different cultures: Chinese, French, and American.
Celine Arnaux is a rich, famous photographer, now 75, whose haunting and bizarrely erotic images of her young granddaughter won her international acclaim and also notoriety years ago, especially in her native China. The only child of a French surgeon and his Chinese wife, raised in Paris in privileged circumstances (albeit shadowed by racism), Celine was and is supremely indifferent to everything but her art. She always neglected her passive daughter Sumin, and was interested in her granddaughter Cameron only as a model. Compliant to a fault, Sumin permitted Cameron to be photographed by Celine from infancy on, often nude or half-clad in Chinese Communist garb of some sort, in settings that evoke barely hidden violence. Presumably the imagery thus created is meant to represent the assault on traditional Chinese culture by Mao Tse-tung's brutal Red Guards during the 1960s and Celine's attempt to come to terms with that repression through her art—though the author offers up all of this without comment. It’s revealed that Celine's aged mother, who returned to Beijing after her husband's death, was found to possess the offending photographs and that a dreadful fate was in store for her. As if the cold-hearted Celine ever cared. When these women converge on an isolated cabin in Virginia for a reunion of sorts because Celine has grudgingly consented to be interviewed there for Aperture, the underlying tension is made all too clear by the ceaseless, icy bickering. Shepard's oddly disjointed story is not served well by frequent shifts in point of view, and a dispassionate style is too often dressed up with quotes from great literature, asides in French, and inconsequential musing on the creative process.
A cerebral study of self-absorbed women that never dares to question its own artistic pretensions.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14667-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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