In this darkly funny scuttle through academe's more covert passageways, Davies—a veteran provider of civil entertainments who's ever Jung-at-heart—first edges his people into medieval archetypes and unexpected passions, then caps the Scholarly spectacle with a splendidly horrid murder. Remote in his eyrie at the Canadian "College of St. John and the Holy Ghost" (known as "Spook"), austere medievalist Clement Hollier is oblivious to the adoration of a lovely grad student: half-gypsy Maria Theotky. (Though once, inexplicably, he "had" her on the sofa.) And Maria's narration alternates with that of Anglican priest/professor Simon Darcourt, who, along with Hollier, is one of Maria's "rebel angels"— those who "taught the daughters of men" after being exiled from Heaven. But she is also fascinated by the verbal stilettos of newly-arrived "Brother John" Pariabane: a Spook alumnus and self-de-frocked monk, a brilliant Doctor of Philosophy, an "important bum. . . a cultivated sponger," a bamboozler and mocking asp. So, while Darcourt chronicles academic monstrosities (including the prize-winning work of a modern alchemist working with human excrement) and Hollier boils with rage at nasty Renaissance scholar Urky McVarish (who has stolen a priceless Rabelais ms.), passions and jealousies brew. Soon there are even exotic visits to Maria's gypsy mother—as Hollier requests curses and Darcourt pants with love for Maria (due to a misdirected love potion). And finally: Parlabane, in a cloud of sulphurous malefactions, wipes Urky and himself from the Earth; Simon comes to his senses; Hollier recognizes love too late; and Maria settles for true love with a nice young rich man. Along the way Davies teases the modern scholars' "conventionality," playfully casting back to the saucy scholars of old. And though for rather a special audience, this is saucy stuff indeed—swept with vaporous invention and fertile with miraculous minnows of donnish wit.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1981
ISBN: 0140062718
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1981
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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