An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections—a big theme that Vida addresses with...
A widow vacationing in Turkey becomes slowly awakened to the tensions in the lives surrounding her and in the ones she left behind.
Like Vida’s previous book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007), this novel concerns a woman eager to escape a host of emotional frustrations back home in the United States. But instead of Northern Lights’ chilly Lapland, this story is set on the sunny southwest coast of Turkey, where Yvonne has retreated after her husband’s death in a car accident; there, she intends to catch up with her daughter, a recovering addict, and her well-adjusted son. But the narrative deals with Yvonne in isolation, and again Vida shows she’s supremely talented at tracing the drifts of memory and emotion that course through a person. The small town where she’s rented a house is near where she and her late husband spent their honeymoon some three decades earlier, and it takes little to get her thinking about her past as a wife and mother. The rented house also affects her imagination. Evidence of the owner’s sex life is poorly hidden in the rooms, and when his estranged wife visits, Yvonne gets further clued into the emotional and sexual tug of war she’s unwittingly stepped into. Though it briefly seems that the novel might take a more sensual turn (the book appears to take its title from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Yvonne’s beach reading), the story soon becomes more complicated. The brief friendships Yvonne strikes up with shop owners, fellow tourists and a young boy on the beach all question how useful it is to try and shed our concerns by pursuing a change of scenery, and Vida’s clear, simple prose exposes how Yvonne’s feelings of loss emerge despite her best efforts. A plot turn following the boy’s disappearance intensifies the emotional pitch, leading to Yvonne’s subtle but powerful revelation about the role she’s played in others’ lives.
An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections—a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-082839-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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