Brave, accomplished and utterly compelling, seamed with passages of haunting, lyrical beauty.
Bell follows up his Haitian trilogy (The Stone that the Builder Refused, 2004, etc.) with a novel of the Confederacy.
Born in poverty, Nathan Bedford Forrest created his own fortune, earned a reputation for inborn military genius and rose to national fame. A self-made man from a hardscrabble background, Forrest was a particularly American figure, and monuments bearing his stony image still dot the American landscape. But he was also a slave trader, a Confederate general and a founding leader of the Ku Klux Klan—at first glance a most unlikely subject for Bell, best known for chronicling a slave-led revolution in three critically praised novels. But it turns out the author is eminently suited for producing an informed, nuanced and not unsympathetic portrait of a man mostly remembered today as a patron saint of white supremacists. Bell puts Forrest in context, re-creating a society in which the enslavement of blacks by whites is traditional and uncontroversial, an unquestioned part of the natural order. Echoing his past work, the author creates a counterpoint to his protagonist in Henri, a Haitian who travels to the United States to stir a slave rebellion but ends up fighting alongside Forrest. Henri brings a Creole perspective and a distinctly African spirituality to the narrative. Bell imagines Forrest’s interactions with Henri and the other black men who follow him, including one who is his son, as well as his relationships with household slaves and the black woman who becomes his longtime mistress. In doing so, he reveals the complexity and range of interracial interaction possible in the Old South. Some will argue that Forrest hardly deserves humanizing, and that argument has merit. But Bell has chosen to exercise one of the novelist’s greatest gifts: He makes an alien world real and, in so doing, reminds us that slavery was not a spontaneous, supernatural evil, but the product of a particular cultural environment.
Brave, accomplished and utterly compelling, seamed with passages of haunting, lyrical beauty.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42488-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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