A well-rendered neoclassic tale of the Old West, worthy of a place alongside Lonesome Dove and Sea of Grass.
Satisfying oater of the old-fashioned—or at least McMurtryesque—school.
Nobody ever said that taming the Wild West would be easy. But must it involve rattlesnakes dropping down from the ceiling to share the evening meal? It must if you’re hard-bitten John Kerney, who just can’t catch a break, even if he can read. His life out on the dusty plains of West Texas is punctuated by his wife’s death in childbirth, his brother’s murder and too damn many bullets. Enter a helpful stranger who, though he violates the code of taciturnity—“In the brush country of southwest Texas, a man’s past was considered his own business, unless he was otherwise inclined to talk about it”—becomes a protector of sorts for Kerney and the son he has had to leave behind. So, too, is another rawhide-tough buckaroo, Cal Doran, who takes no guff himself. Alas, John is not with the narrative for long before other obligations come due, but his son more than takes his place in a narrative that soon becomes very busy, crowded with real-world characters from late 19th-century New Mexico, among them Pat Garrett (the lawman who gunned down Billy the Kid) and Oliver Lee (the rancher “on the east side of the Tularosa” who may or may not have gunned down a neighbor in a feud that still reverberates). There’s plenty of period detail in this western by mystery novelist McGarrity (Tularosa, 1996, etc.). There’s appropriate language to boot; as a wizened old rancher reflects, for instance, “A waddie looking for work on foot wasn’t typical, and the saddle sure didn’t show much pride.” Yet there’s no anachronism one way or another, not too much Walter Brennan-ish gibberish or too many false concessions to modernity.
A well-rendered neoclassic tale of the Old West, worthy of a place alongside Lonesome Dove and Sea of Grass.Pub Date: May 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-525-95246-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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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