A smart and satisfying archaeological thriller in the vein of Dan Brown.
A Greek archaeological dig holds deep secrets.
At the beginning of Azuski’s (The Rose-Tinted Menagerie, 2012) latest novel, 22-year-old Nicholas Pedrosa is fresh out of college. He’s stuck in a dead-end real estate job in England when he applies for a job on an archaeological dig on the Greek island of Santorini under the direction of the legendary archaeologist Marcus James Huxley. His interview with Huxley’s frosty Russian assistant, Svetlana Bé, goes so poorly that Pedrosa assumes he’s not getting the job—until boat tickets and travel details arrive in the mail. He travels to Greece, intrigued to learn along the way that Huxley’s expedition has uncovered mysterious 5,000-year-old hieroglyphics at the site. Curiosity turns to dread when Pedrosa arrives at Santorini only to find Huxley and his associates attending a funeral—the funeral of Huxley’s previous young assistant. Pedrosa gets a decidedly unfriendly reception from the great man, and he’s promptly confronted with two mysteries—What actually happened to his predecessor? And what happened to all the ancient inhabitants of the city that was buried in a volcanic eruption thousands of years ago on the site of Huxley’s dig? The homes and workplaces of those ancient inhabitants are perfectly preserved, but unlike other famous disaster sites, such as Pompeii, there’s no trace of any people. Azuski knits these plotlines together with considerable skill, contextualizing them within the wider philosophical background of a search for Plato’s mythical lost city of Atlantis and infusing them with plenty of memorable descriptions (“The dawn chorus woke me at five,” Pedrosa says, “Athens’ version of it, that is, cars, trucks, buses, motorbikes racing the clock, chasing the sunrise”). The imperious Huxley and his private agenda dominate the plot, and the baffled, inquisitive Pedrosa eventually becomes a hero to root for as he navigates the various personalities of Huxley’s dig team. Ongoing digressions into Santorini’s distant past jar at first but ultimately reinforce the novel’s taut, well-constructed climax.
A smart and satisfying archaeological thriller in the vein of Dan Brown.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-3952401521
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Iridescent Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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