A delicately rendered homage to Native American storytelling.
Belleli (Contes de la Lune, 2005, etc.) tells the story of a continent-crossing hero in this mythology-infused children’s novel.
Tali Nohkati is the child of the first man and first woman, watched over by Moon and Coyote, the two primordial beings who created the world. After a great fire kills Tali Nohkati’s parents and renders the land barren and dead, the Moon and Coyote are forced to send the boy on a journey to find a new home in the lands beyond the horizon. He first goes to the White Land of ice and snow, where the polar bear Yupik teaches him to hunt. When winter comes, he builds a boat and follows the whale Atii south to warmer climes. Along the way, Atii helps him fish, and when a storm destroys his skiff, the whale allows him to ride in her throat. After further adventures in forests, plains, and deserts among wolves, bison, and snakes, respectively, Tali Nohkati finally reaches the Land of the Red Earth, where he finds his fellow men. Rakenika, a man who wears an eagle feather in his hair, adopts the boy into his tribe and teaches him the ways of the Great Hunt. The world of men is even more complex than that of animals, however, and Tali Nohkati will have to weather a host of dangers—both human and superhuman—before he’ll find peace. Belleli, as translated from the French by debut translator Heller, tells the story in the simple but often lyrical prose style of a folktale, as in this passage, in which injured bison Atsina entreats the boy to make use of his body: “ ‘But who talks of leaving me?’ the bison said reassuringly, in a last effort. ‘You will take me with you. You will eat my meat, and I will give you my strength. You will tan my skin, and I will shelter your nights.’ ” The novel appears to borrow bits of mythology from across the Americas, from the Eskimo-Aleut names of the polar bears to an appearance by the monstrous Huracan of the ancient Mayans. Often allegorical and always magical, the book manages to feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary.
A delicately rendered homage to Native American storytelling.Pub Date: May 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-258-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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