An American banker adrift in Venice takes up with an older woman—centuries older—whom he encounters while meandering through the city's labyrinth of back streets, in an erotically charged, dreamlike third novel from Girardi (Madeleine's Ghost, 1995; The Pirate's Daughter, 1997). Jack Squire, a foreign exchange trader in Washington, D.C., is handed a plum assignment: to study Italian politics in Venice so that his bank can make a killing on the lira after the upcoming national elections. But once he arrives, something about the city won't let him sleep, or do his job properly. In the wee hours one morning, after yet another night of insomnia, Jack meets Caterina, who's feeding a yowling horde of the famous Venetian alley cats, and he's stunned by her pale, ethereal beauty. In subsequent meetings, Caterina tells him nothing about herself, but eventually she takes him to meet some of her friends, who are every bit as mysterious as she. By day Jack bungles his reports to Washington; by night he and Caterina become lovers, so that his nocturnal adventures with her are soon all he really cares about. A disastrous business meeting with his boss in Milan seems to signal the end of his career, until he discovers that he can somehow read imminent death in the other man's eyes, leaving the boss so unnerved that he spares Jack the ax. Soon after, Caterina stops seeing him, but he manages to find the place where she feeds cats again and trail her on her way home, finally spotting her as she boards a vaporetto with all of her weird friends. Jack later reaches the vaporetto's destination—and has his worst fears about the love of his life confirmed. For as long as tale's dream state is sustained, the result is exquisite and eerie. But the last third, involving a retirement home in Arizona and a new career in Bar Harbor, Maine, ranges far from Venice—and breaks the spell.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-31938-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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