If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.
The famed saga of Korea’s bandit prince comes in for a new translation, if one that’s not quite idiomatic.
“Kick me with full force, so that I may know your strength.” Not exactly the sort of thing that one would cry out in the midst of some emotional moment, not exactly the most memorable of challenges. Yet, the statement and its rejoinder—“But after you kicked me I could feel my organs vibrate and my body shiver, so I know that you are a man of tremendous power”—alert us that we are in the Land of Translation, a place lots of readers associate with mustiness, fustiness, and all-around yawns. The most exciting of Hong Gildong’s adventures come to us in a chrome of not-quite-English. In fairness, he has many of them.The anonymous early modern epic celebrates the deeds of a lowborn lad, the son of a concubine, whose abilities—“He needed to hear only one thing to understand ten, and learning ten things allowed him to master a hundred”—did not go unremarked in court but naturally excited intrigue and jealousy. What’s a good prince to do? Go off and battle for truth, justice, and the Korean way, of course, taking up cause with the merry bandits of the Taebaek Mountains, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and doing suchlike things that would meet with the approval of a checklist-wielding Joseph Campbell: liminality, check. Near-death experience, check. Students of comparative mythology will be interested to see how bits of other literatures (especially Arthurian) turn up in Hong Gildong’s story. The introduction might have made more of this lineage and discussed in more detail how modern Korean writers make use of the story in their work, but it does a competent job overall of placing the book in the context of Korean literature.
If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-310769-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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