The Guyanese-born Heath (the superb Armstrong Trilogy, 1994, etc.) surpasses himself with this ambitious, vividly written, psychologically rich chronicle—set in his own colorfully multiracial native country—of compromised ambition and family conflict. Originally published in 1988 in England (where Heath now lives), it's the story of Betta Singh, a physician of Indian descent who gives up a promising private practice to work as a GMO (Government Medical Officer) on a Guyanese ``sugar estate'' (i.e., plantation), hoping to help stem the tide of malaria that regularly strikes down its exploited and neglected native workers. And, most memorably, it's the story of his wealthy, domineering widowed mother (who ridicules Betta's selflessness), ``an exile from marriage and from her country . . . stranded on the shore of an unrelenting loneliness.'' As Betta challenges his heartless superiors, then painstakingly adjusts to the defeat of his ideals and the complex pressures of marriage and fatherhood, Mrs. Singh sternly deals with her own embattled household, meanwhile falling under the calculating influence of the Pujaree, a Hindu holy man who seduces her and takes over her home and money, to the end of building his own temple. The story features a host of skillfully drawn secondary characters, all of whom exhibit entirely credible conflicting impulses and desires, examined with nonjudgmental understanding and sympathy (even the crafty Pujaree emerges as a very human mixture of pure and impure motives). And in the harrowing progression from mother's love through sexual enslavement to climactic violence and madness of Betta's larger-than-life mother, the author has achieved a masterly feat of characterization: This is a woman whom no reader will easily forget. Heath's brilliant novel—also distinguished for its flexible and lyrical prose, expert handling of its several native populations, varieties of pidgin English, and memorable use of figurative language—was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It's hard to believe it didn't win.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-89255-213-1
Page Count: 438
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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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