A rewarding and beautifully written, if blood-soaked, tale.
Romeo and Juliet meets Arturo Pérez-Reverte and John le Carré in the dusty streets of Damascus in this novel from Syrian-born Schami, a bestselling author in his adopted homeland of Germany.
The setup: The body of a Syrian intelligence officer is found in a rather unnatural position that rules out suicide. A police commissioner named Barudi steps in to investigate. Stop one is the alluring young widow, “composed, cool, and monosyllabic”—and utterly unhelpful, though Barudi, lonely bachelor that he is, allows that he “would have liked to catch a glimpse of whatever lay beneath her façade.” What lies beneath Madhi Said’s murder, however, is anything but monosyllabic. Bit by bit, Schami reveals an endlessly complex tale that turns on a simple universal: Boy meets girl, boy’s mom and dad disapprove, girl’s mom and dad disapprove, mayhem ensues. The Shahin and Mushtak clans are bound, as if by fate, to hate each other with pure fire, as young Rana Shahin and Farid Mushtak discover, try as they might to get away from the discord and merely be together. (“I want you to know,” Rana tells Farid, “that even if I have to wait all my life to live free with you for a single day, I won’t regret it.”) The reader soon senses, as this long but swiftly paced narrative unfolds, that there is more going on than an ordinary vendetta, for Schami is carefully describing life under one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world, and moreover, the dissolution of ancient bonds that enabled Syria’s Christians, Muslims and Jews to coexist. Schami’s multilayered allegory is never obviously allegorical, but it is insistent in exploring the mysteries of identity (“His real name was not George Mushtak at all, but Nassif Jasegi”). The truth that Barudi eventually ferrets out pleases no one, and, as in all dictatorships, he is punished for it—caught, as it happens, in a blood feud of a different kind.
A rewarding and beautifully written, if blood-soaked, tale.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56656-780-0
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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