A superb collection, without a single dud. Grab it.
September 11, the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq . . . . Why not explore our new reality through fiction, the truest gauge of the national psyche? That was Elliott’s bright idea. And the result? A deeply impressive collection of 26 previously unpublished stories.
Novelist Elliott (What It Means to Love You, 2002, etc.) has chosen a dynamite opener: “The President’s New Clothes,” by Anne Ursu. Using the familiar gimmick of the body-switch, Ursu has Dubya waking up in the body of a Minnesotan kid. What follows is sunny, upbeat and lethal, the perfect fable for an empty-suit presidency. Four stories focus on 9/11 and its immediate aftermath; not surprisingly, the surreal version (“Mr. Mxyzptlk’s Opus,” by Ben Greenman) is as effective as realistic treatments like the “End-of-the-World Sex,” by Tsaurah Litzhy, which highlights the correlation of sex and death. Two fine stories examine the effect of politics and terrorism on personal relationships. In Alicia Erian’s “The Winning Side,” husband and wife protest together the detention of immigrants, yet perversely their marriage drifts further onto the rocks, while in “Should I Be Scared?” by Amanda Eyre Ward, the anthrax scare opens up a rift in another marriage. Six authors take on the Persian Gulf wars. In “Freedom Oil,” Anthony Swofford has an oilman put together a showbiz sendoff for our boys at San Diego airport. Two marines fresh out of boot camp are sucked into a swirl of sex, liquor, and phony patriotism. The flip side is the story that cannot be told too often, seldom better done than here: the homecoming of the soldier who is still living with the horror (“The Designated Marksman,” Otis Haschemeyer). Two other gems must be mentioned: the wickedly on-target notes of sessions with public figures by a real-life dominatrix (“All in a Day’s Work,” by Mistress Morgana), and a small masterpiece of absurdist logic by the Palestinian Nasri Hajjaj, about a man who slaughters his family and is promptly honored by his nation’s leader (“I Believe I’m in Love With the Government”).
A superb collection, without a single dud. Grab it.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-58-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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