Sorry — but even the voice of the Pulitzer jury cannot make me one of Lanny Budd's fans. This is the fifth in the series — and all the ingredients which apparently made for popularity of the first four are here again. The characters are chiefly old friends; Lanny and Irma are divorced; Trudy and Lanny secretly married — and then she disappears; Beauty continues to hold court on the Riviera; Irma has married her landed aristocrat, and becomes a vocal member of the Cliveden set; and Lanny's closest friends have "gone underground". Lanny turns all efforts into trying to find Trudy and during the period he attempts to carry on as she would have him. He uses his art contacts to keep in touch with the highest officials in the Nazi party, in France, in Germany; he plays up his interest (one is kept in some doubt as to the depth of his sincerity) in psychic phenomena, and eventually makes this a link with Hitler and Hess; he plays both ends against the middle, acting as "Presidential Agent" and getting important data out from neutral countries to F.D.R. — and at the same time, feeding the beast with tidbits (which were probably already known) to keep up the pretense of his own fascistic leanings (and conceal his "pinkness"). There's one hair-breadth escape — a futile gesture — for ultimately he knows that Trudy has died at Daehau. Lanny is given credit for various world-shaping events-, the Quarantine Speech, etc; he has his finger in the Munich-Berchtesgaden — Godesberg affairs. He finds out what he needs to know, and holds on to the long-range view. The story stops short of the invasion of Poland. All the panoply of luxurious living is there; the sense of being at the heart of things. Probably many who get little from the papers will feel better informed on the steps leading to war because of reading these books. It will sell — and rent.
Pub Date: June 2, 1944
ISBN: 1931313059
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1944
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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