A gothic novella that captures the sensuality of both love and grief.
In Coldiron’s (After Gardens, 2019) haunting novella, inspired by the Florence + the Machine album of the same name, two young women struggle to accept their lost love after death tears them apart.
Two months before their graduation from The Cartwright School for Young Ladies, Amelia and Corisande, a young couple, take a boat out on the lake—their quiet spot to “scream or laugh…be alone together, to pretend no one else had ever seen [them].” But when Corisande jumps into the freezing water, dives to the bottom, and drowns, Amelia is left to face the world alone: “The wind swept through the Cartwright School and scattered us, leaves, across the sky. I went to a city and…found a room to sleep in, floorboards where I planted memories of you.” Coldiron’s language, which dances between poetry and prose, retains the soul of its source material while evoking the fragmentary nature of a young life in mourning. Her imagery, meanwhile, conjures a sensuous, gothic atmosphere—one as haunting and ubiquitous for the reader as Corisande’s ghost is in Amelia’s life. Most powerful, perhaps, is Coldiron’s ability to capture Amelia’s yearning for the physical touch of a body that is no more: “And there you are...your skin rosy as a peach…I crawl and I clutch at your calves and I crack open my heart to howl at the tree that curves over the gravestones, you, glimmering, the thing in my arms a flat stone carved with your name, Corisande.” This story, however, is not only Amelia’s, and chapters narrated by Corisande convey her own desperation to bridge the gap between the world of bodies and that of spirits. While not every reader will instantly take to Coldiron’s heightened language—it is sometimes difficult to settle into the dreamscape—the emotions of this passionate love story always feel sincere.
A gothic novella that captures the sensuality of both love and grief.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73232-515-9
Page Count: 134
Publisher: KERNPUNKT Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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