A deft exploration of the heart and mind that offers the pathos of a Sam Shepard play nested within the unreliable...
An architect who's been injured in a car accident must piece together the roots of his despair.
Canadian neurologist Durcan (Garcia’s Heart, 2009, etc.) continues his explorations of the human mind with this spare, ethereal novel about a man who loses his ability to perceive the world as it is. In it we meet Martin, a much-admired middle-aged architect who's just emerged from a coma following the accident. His older brother, Brendan, a retired veterinarian, has chosen to set aside long-held family resentments to come care for his sibling. The author has given his protagonist a jarring condition called “neglect syndrome,” which leaves the victim unable to perceive space or stimuli on half of his body yet also unaware that his perceptions are compromised. For a man who builds in three dimensions, this is a crippling blow. We also learn that Martin has been bought out of his own firm, but he can't remember how or why. In icy prose that belies its emotional weight, Durcan turns Martin’s grief into a mystery. Why was the architect parked on a snowy Quebec roadside when he was struck by a speeding snowplow? Why was there a brand-new roll of duct tape and a garden hose in his trunk? Durcan also gives Martin an obsession with real-life Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov, best known for his refusal to conform to Stalinist architectural mandates. The book's language is poetic, but it's underscored by the story’s spooky mood and emotional authenticity. “Had he been in the midst of ending his life or refusing to do so?” Durcan writes. “For Brendan, understanding what had actually happened to his brother was reduced to a dilemma—binary, existential and unknowable now that the only person who truly knew had had his intention scraped clean by the blade of a snow plow.”
A deft exploration of the heart and mind that offers the pathos of a Sam Shepard play nested within the unreliable storytelling of Christopher Nolan’s Memento.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942658-04-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
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