A gentle tale of an island buffeted by wild winds and imbued with melancholy.
A tender evocation of a sheltered valley.
In his delicately wrought debut novel, journalist, songwriter, and nonfiction writer Tallack (The Undiscovered Islands:An Archipelago of Myths and Mysteries, Phantoms and Fakes, 2017, etc.) explores the meaning of place, freedom, and community to residents of a remote Scottish island. Like Anne Tyler’s Baltimore or Jane Smiley’s Iowa, Tallack’s Shetland valley, a landscape that he knows intimately, is integral to the lives of his characters, who seek solace and communion there: emotionally wounded Sandy, for one; Alice, a mystery writer grieving after her husband’s sudden death; and Terry, escaping loneliness in alcohol. For Sandy, who lives in one of the island’s larger towns, the valley insulates him “from the fractured world that once had seemed so threatening,” making him feel “absorbed by the place, without being destroyed by it.” He came with his girlfriend, Emma, whose parents are crofters, a way of life her father inherited without question: “both a gift and a choice.” Emma, though, feeling smothered by the valley, has left, suddenly, to make other choices. When her father offers Sandy work and a place to live, the young man decides to stay. Also escaping a fractured world is Alice, who has returned to the island that enchanted her on her honeymoon. Now she plans to write about it, “to contain it in words and in thoughts, to describe the place and to encompass it.” Provisionally titled The Valley at the Centre of the World, the book project, she hopes, will give her a sense of belonging. But learning about hedgehogs, sheep, and hares leaves Alice longing to know more about her elusive, reticent neighbors. After an elderly woman dies, her journals, diaries, and letters are passed on to Alice. But neither the writings nor the woman’s house, which Sandy moves into, reveal Maggie’s inner life. Indeed, Tallack’s gentle, compassionate portrayal of his characters leaves their hearts and minds inviolable: “Sometimes,” one woman remarks to Terry, “things lose their magic when you know how to take them apart.”
A gentle tale of an island buffeted by wild winds and imbued with melancholy.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78689-230-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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