Stilted style, lots of expository dialogue, and an utterly predictable plot, from the son of Rosamunde.
Silly soap opera from the author of An Ocean Apart (1999).
Hunky husband Gregor leaves devoted wife Liz for a “wee blonde-haired bombshell” in a tight pink sweater, and Liz retreats to her father’s farm on the island of Fife to think things over. Nathaniel Craig, lonely after his wife’s death, welcomes his middle-aged daughter back. The crux of the story: Nathaniel’s grandson Alex has plans to convert the family land into a golf course, even though they’ve farmed it for over a hundred and fifty years. Liz has her doubts, while Nathaniel would just as soon sell, provided he can continue to live in the farmhouse. Then Liz finds herself attracted to a boarder supplied by her matchmaking father and even goes so far as to comb her hair in a more becoming fashion.. Arthur Kempler is a professor of German, and too old to want sex, but he does desire female companionship and invites lovelorn Liz to Seville, where the two take in the local color. Plans for the golf course are taking shape when Nathaniel meets a new woman: 60-ish Roberta (Bobby) Bayliss, Australian daughter of a Scotland-born tycoon. Bobby is a no-nonsense type and one hell of a golfer. After falling in love in a matter-of-fact way with old Nathaniel, she decides to use the vast fortune her father left her to create the best new links in Britain. Liz returns home with a great tan and blond highlights, only to hear that Gregor has been badly burned in a car accident and that he’s had enough of his wee bombshell, having caught her flirting with another man in a local pub. Can Liz ever forgive him? Take him back? These and other questions are resolved in a ho-hum denouement that will surprise no one.
Stilted style, lots of expository dialogue, and an utterly predictable plot, from the son of Rosamunde.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26995-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
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