Despite (or because of) her poetic flair, Addonizio’s overly romantic, dreamy take on the marginal world of her characters...
In Addonizio’s lumpen proletariat fairy tale, a young homeless woman in San Francisco survives a series of degradations, often self-inflicted, in her search for her lost husband.
By anyone’s standards, 24-year-old Rita has had a hard life. Raised in foster care after her mother’s murder by a boyfriend who also molested Rita, she began turning tricks at an early age and became addicted to heroin and alcohol. But the gamin beauty has found happiness with her husband Jimmy, a sweet man who plays the harmonica and holds a job, at least for a while. Rita and Jimmy’s fragile security shatters when they are evicted from their apartment. They move into a shabby hotel until Rita storms out after a fight over her heroin addiction. By the time she returns, Jimmy is gone. Rita finds herself on the streets. Addonizio (Little Beauties, 2005, etc.) describes with relish Rita’s wanderings among the city’s underclass: the homeless men in the park, the seedy hotels, the drug dealers. Street life’s usual danger is heightened when Rita witnesses a crime, but Gary, a private detective, takes her under his protection. Feeling pressured by his wife’s desire to have a child, Gary has begun his own downward spiral into alcoholism and thinks he’s fallen in love with Rita. All she wants is to find Jimmy. She has no idea that he’s been in jail for three months for his semi-involvement in a botched robbery. Now out, he is working hard at an Italian restaurant where he’s promoted from kitchen help to waiter, but his choice of friends threatens to get him into more trouble. As Rita and Jimmy long for each other, coincidences work against them until each grows relatively stronger and their paths converge into a not-quite-plausible happy ending.
Despite (or because of) her poetic flair, Addonizio’s overly romantic, dreamy take on the marginal world of her characters comes across as synthetic.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9772-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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