Hilarious and touching, icily removed, yet bracingly real.
Being held up at gunpoint either sends a college student into the throes of despair or gives her a new reason to live: maybe a healthy dash of both.
It’s a good thing Vida (Girls on the Verge, 1999) makes her fiction debut with this novel instead of a story collection: she takes getting used to, but it’s worthwhile. Ellis is a 21-year-old Columbia University student walking in Riverside Park when a man tells her that he’s going to kill her, then himself. Trying to convince him of everything worth living for, Ellis spouts poetry, throwing everything at him from “Leda and the Swan” to William Carlos Williams and Philip Larkin, melting his despair until he lets her go. Later, when the police come to her apartment and her roommate answers the door, Ellis thinks: “I wonder if this is how it will be from now on: whenever there are policemen at the door we’ll assume they’re for me.” The remainder of the tale is a short string of nonevents (even the trip Ellis takes to the Philippines hardly registers), the dull detritus of a benumbed student’s life. It’s a frustrating, brilliant story about an irritating person with genuine trauma acting hatefully to all those around her. There’s too much smartass to the book: in a scene when an old high school friend is telling Ellis about a teacher who taught Sylvia Plath, Vida can’t resist throwing in that the teacher “put her head in the oven.” But then two pages later, when Ellis is obnoxiously lying and claiming to have been raped, she thinks: “I feel oddly liberated and I realize why: if I had been raped, I’d feel more justified doing everything I’m doing.” It’s a genius line, ringing true—but sure to be undermined by another poor joke later on (we won’t get into the scene where Ellis goes to the barber and gets a mullet—too much Gen-X irony in that one).
Hilarious and touching, icily removed, yet bracingly real.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4027-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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