The work of this Australian writer (Vanishing Points, 1992, etc.)—in a diction studded with some breathtaking images and conceits—continues to strengthen in depth and focus, and Astley again penetrates the shrouding canopies of loneliness to find the hope of rescue. Among those existing miserably amid ``excitability and want'' (a keystone indictment from Hunting the Wild Pineapple, 1991): a mild music teacher and his fearful/angry teenaged son; a priest and a bewildered nun; a desiccated aging single woman and a battered teenager. The four days during which Keith, 15-year-old son of piano- teacher Bernard Leverson, is unaccountably absent will seem in retrospect to have been years—of nonloving. Where is the love between father and son? To Keith, angry, bruised, and nasty, his father offers no ``rules,'' no safety; and mother Iris is having an affair with a family friend—actually a comically unlustful and boring friend. Bernard will speak and write of his worries to Fr. Doug Lingard, a Catholic priest, himself a tired victim of ``spiritual weightlessness.'' But Bernard finds everywhere ``this rolling dullness in human relationships.'' At a convent, where he gives exams in music, he witnesses the emotional aridity of a nun struggling with an empty heart, then escapes the screaming need of an achingly sad teacher. Meanwhile, on the lam, are Keith—as well as teenaged ``Chookie,'' forever unloved, a muddled Calaban, fleeing from a crime of rape. By the catastrophic close, a family is restored to love and the priest will know the brush of blessing in the act of ``restoring hope in another.'' Astley's style is occasionally choked perhaps, but also choked often with brilliants (on arriving patrons in a gloomy lounge: ``The room filled up with crustaceans—varnished hard-jawed mums and small-bit farmers all coated with the same malty staleness''). With humor and bite, then, some deep discoveries about shallow lives.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13875-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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