Dramatically light, but historically and sociologically interesting.
From Lisbon to Montreal, De Andrade’s (The Little Sect, 2015, etc.) second novel follows the lives of Marta and Tiago Sousa, a young Portuguese couple who stake their hopes for better opportunities on a move to Canada.
In April of 1974, the fascist government of Portugal that had ruled for almost 50 years was overthrown in a one-day military coup that was known as the Carnation Revolution. It’s on the morning of this revolution that we meet Marta and Tiago, both 24 years old, three-months married, and about to move into a new apartment just outside Lisbon. Marta works in the Lisbon office of SKF, a Swedish company, and Tiago is a mechanic for Auto Europa. Tiago has longed to move to Canada, where he believes that greater chances await for advancement and he can one day run his own auto-repair business. But Marta is pregnant, and the revolution bodes well for their future. They decide to remain close to family and friends, and the first half of the novel depicts the early, Lisbon years of their marriage. In 1979, Tiago is restless, and they agree to move to Montreal with their 4-year old son, Paulo, and start over. What follows is an immigrant’s tale—the hope, the fear, the challenges of learning to be part of a new cultural milieu, not to mention the need to become fluent in two new languages, English and French. The third-person narrative centers around Marta and concentrates on her family relationships and workplace experiences. She obtains employment with a shoe company, S & K Imports, and remains there for 30 years, until her retirement. This focus on her office life—in Lisbon and in Montreal—gives De Andrade the opportunity to explore differences between multicultural French Canada and homogeneous Portugal in terms of social norms, employee environments, and political institutions. There are sporadic grammatical stumbling blocks (“Tiago made sure to have Marta sat by his side.”), but the text is informative, if not quite passionate.
Dramatically light, but historically and sociologically interesting.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-9716-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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