A sprawling, freewheeling tale of a young woman's uncanny sexual powers, the virtues of altruism, the Devil, Dan Quayle (herein known as Jefferson Stinkweed), and the bad stuff that happens if you watch TV, among other things. The young woman is Celeste Kipplebaum Runetoon Kelly, born to a mother two days dead, which gives you a good idea of what you're in for—a whimsical but freighted journey down roads already well traveled by Tom Robbins's sexually free, gloriously misfit hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). Celeste's bliss, however, comes not from the pursuit of pure freedom but from the orgasmic thrill of healing others though sexual connection. Not content with mere physical healing, mind you (though she can cure AIDS, no problem), she gets deep into the very soul of each sufferer she fondles, from a browbeaten and balding neighbor to a tap-dancing serial killer, and melts away the hurt, restoring each to his (or her) youthful, unsaddened, unsullied self. Despite the perks that come with her work, Celeste (aka ``Queen of the Unseen, the Princess of Caress, the Dame of the Lame, the Countess of Regress, Her Majesty of Nudity,'' as the little voices between her legs chant) sometimes tires of her relentless sexual battle against the forces of evil, longing to be ordinary. ``Did King Arthur wish he were normal? Don Quixote?'' sputters her grandmother with righteous indignation. ``Whoever said being a knight would be easy? You can perform unprecedented miracles! Consider yourself lucky.'' So Celeste presses on, and on, to a climactic meeting with the Prince of Darkness himself. Perhaps no one can surpass Robbins's sublime stew of nonsense and wisdom, though this, Simon's first novel (her short-story collection, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, 1990, mined much of the same territory), has plenty of the former and is abubble with wildly imaginative, sometimes gratingly cute language: ``She shoved the window open. The lake sibilated, geese ronked, leaves oodly-oodly-ooed.'' But despite its heavy themes—the spiritual sickness rampant in modern society, the redemptive powers of love- -and core of seriousness, the novel never gets any more than ankle-deep; and Celeste's powers, so seductive to others, never convince or move us. Simon's story is fun to spend the night with, but there's no afterglow.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85262-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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