A masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath.
A friendship between two women, forged during the tumult of 1968, is tested, torn and reaffirmed over the course of their very different lives.
Georgette George, a shy freshman scholarship student at Barnard, doesn’t know what to make of privileged, idealistic Ann Drayton. A firebrand for racial and social justice, Ann asked for a roommate “as different as possible” from her, in hope of bunking with a black woman, but accepts George, who is white, because at least she is from a poor home in upstate New York. The other freshmen find Ann a puzzle, too, and George befriends her initially because no one else—black or white—does. Over time, this headstrong self-made martyr, who gives away money by the fistful and lectures her bewildered parents on the sins of being white and rich, wins her heart, until Ann’s righteousness causes an irreconcilable rift. Long after the two go their separate ways—Ann continues her activism in Harlem with her black schoolteacher lover; George works her way up the masthead at a fashion magazine—Ann is arrested for killing a police officer. Although they haven’t spoken in years, George knows there is much more to the story than the newspapers report. Ann, who refuses all help, is convicted of murder and sentenced to life. George cannot begin to comprehend what has befallen her friend until she runs into Ann’s patrician father, recently widowed. In perhaps the ultimate betrayal, but perhaps also the only way to connect with the inscrutable Ann, they have an affair, which, especially as portrayed by the philosophically adroit Nunez (For Rouenna, 2001), eventually helps George understand that friendships have many chapters, and that Ann, who works on prison reform from the inside despite the wrath of her fellow inmates who won’t trust a white woman, just may not have closed the book on George yet.
A masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18381-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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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