A tart but ultimately hollow portrait of a narcissist parading toward hubris.
A retired British diplomat uses his newly acquired free time to explore the mysteries of his own mind.
There’s an air of absurdity that buoys but can’t save this bizarre debut novel by Balding, longtime chief executive officer of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. We meet our protagonist, Victor Andrews, as he prepares to undergo an angioplasty at the age of 50. Perhaps it’s the shadow of his own mortality at play, but subsequently, this very British creature of habit begins to ponder all manner of things—the psyche of mass murderers is a recurring motif, as are sex, atheism, and the nature of reality. It’s probably best that Victor is given to long soliloquies, as his only real companions are his lady friend, Helen, a psychoanalyst, and a newly acquired parrot, Yorick. Among Victor’s myriad theories is the idea that should humans achieve total objectivity, they might expand their consciousness to the point they mutate into a new species, hence the title. It is fitfully funny at times—for all his loquacious speeches, our man is an utter horndog who spends more time pondering his manhood than his humanity. “You penetrate me like a solemn god entering his temple” could easily qualify for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Victor also spends half the book trying to teach Yorick to say things like “God is dead,” to the point the whole enterprise feels like an overly cerebral but interminable Monty Python skit. Close followers of philosophy may find some value in all this cerebral navel-gazing as Victor prattles on, name-checking Pascal, Kafka, and Nietzsche, among others. Most readers may feel more like Helen does when she asks, “What’s actually the matter with you? It’s as though your head had cracked open and you were picking out pieces of your brain and examining them for sense.”
A tart but ultimately hollow portrait of a narcissist parading toward hubris.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935830-46-7
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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