Rich, stylish, turn-of-the-century vampire spy novel set in England, Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, and on the trains tying the le CarrÇ-ish spy networks together: a sequel to Hambly's memorable Those Who Hunt the Night (1988). Hambly at last outdoes early Rice for fine writing while avoiding Rice's light lavender hand. Every page shows immense research and attention to Continental textures of life nearly a century ago as WW I rumbles in the far distance. In the first novel, Hambly showed us Edwardian England though the eyes of ex-spy James Asher and young wife Lydia, and through the undead eyes of London's oldest vampire, the Spanish aristocrat Don Simon Ysidro. That initial installment focused on a monstrous mutant vampire who was killing all the vampires of London and drinking their blood. Now the plot grows into parallel lines, with James and Lydia apart and traveling separately with vampires toward an eventual rejoining. The two plotlines move like moonlit chapters by Sax Rohmer (with vampires replacing Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril), the story of James chasing vampire spies alternating with episodes from a Louisa May Alcott thriller about Lydia. Vampires, it seems, are as territorial as birds and get highly upset if a London bloodsucker invades the Paris or Vienna feeding grounds and willy- nilly brings on police activity after promiscuously sucking dry improper victims. James discovers that England's enemies have hired vampire double agents, including the Earl of Ernchester, now a vampire, who has left London for the Continent accompanied by top Hungarian vampire Ignace Karolyi, seemingly intent on selling his vampire abilities of getting in and out of places like mist through a keyhole. Lydia, however, discovers that James is in great danger and, protected by Don Ysidro, sets out to save him. The climax: a tragicomic opera among woman-hating, top-lofty Turkish vampires. Pages to read gold-stained by lamplight. (First printing of 50,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38102-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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