Breathtakingly well-written. And how could one not keep reading, no matter how endless, a book with a line such as “You...
Vast opening salvo in a thunderous assault on the prideful prejudice that separates “us” from “them” in the time of AIDS.
“I may be going back further than necessary in laying out the backstory,” writes author/activist Kramer (Faggots, 1978, etc.), “but if this is the prime complaint against me, I shall remain consistent to my belief that all is better than less than all….I remind you once again that this is my history of the plague.” Our narrator is not quite omniscient, just as this huge book doesn’t exactly sprawl; sometimes it lounges like an odalisque, and sometimes it huffs up to grizzly bear proportions. Ever the controversialist, Kramer doesn’t hesitate to start on provocative ground: After introducing us to an alter ego–ish writer who is struggling with an equally massive history of the American people—the other ones, the ones who are enduring this “Plague of The Underlying Condition”—he announces that “the First American People are monkeys who ate each other.” Say what? Kramer’s anthropology may have its debatable points, but it points both to the antiquity of the illness and to a human condition—ahem, underlying condition—of violence and segregation, to a chronology that hurtles forward to Ronald Reagan’s coded assurance that there was indeed an “us” and a “them” at play in the terrible disease. The victims are endless: “sailors, whores, orphaned children, the abscessed, the poxed, the near-dead, and yes, the dead” figure in Kramer’s genealogy, which, for all of its awareness of the Grim Reaper, is defiantly lively. There is nary a dog in these pages that is not supremely shaggy, never a missed opportunity to offend someone. Kramer ranges among voices, eras and styles, the dominant ones being steely anger shading into Pynchon-esque goofiness but always with serious intent.
Breathtakingly well-written. And how could one not keep reading, no matter how endless, a book with a line such as “You don’t just drop a penis like Tibby’s into the narrative and let it go”?Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-10439-9
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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