As usual, West (Sporting With Amaryllis, 1996, etc.) offers erudite commentary and provocative insights into the human predicament, this time in a tale told by an extraterrestrial about two American pilots bound by friendship and history. West's novice novelist, One Eighth Humbly—who writes the novel one reads here—is a kind of extraterrestrial Gulliver who describes a world quite unlike his own, and in doing so implicitly tries to understand life on his own star as well as on Earth. Like earthlings, he looks for, but doesn't find, proof of an almighty being's existence amid the enormous amount of information he and fellow aliens have assembled. But the story he tells of Clegg and Booth, American military pilots, does afford him a chance to observe humans—intelligent beings for the most part—as they try to understand themselves and the situations that confront them. The novelist doesn't quite get how everything works on earth—the notion of seasons confuses him, his pilots are preternaturally literary—but he gets better as the story picks up momentum. As they fly their high altitude spy-plane Cyrano on its daily sweep above the earth, Clegg and his superior officer, Booth, develop a symbiotic relationship based on flying and on Clegg's fascination with what makes Booth tick. When Cyrano is attacked over Africa, the two men parachute into the Ethiopian desert, where Clegg is caught on a rocky ledge and Booth falls in with a band of cruel salt-miners. As challenging as these experiences are, they're not as difficult as life after their rescue. Finding their debriefings increasingly incomprehensible, even threatening, the two escape, adopt new identities, and go into business as charter pilots. But freedom has its own challenges. Haunted by their heroic pasts, they discover, tragically, that they can't adjust to the prosaic realities of their lives. A splendid assembly of ideas, language, and allusions, though sometimes the sheer intellectual exuberance overwhelms the story, however conceptually brilliant.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80032-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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