Sometimes precious and perhaps a little too short to contain all the author’s ambitions. Still, a lively, smart study of a...
No one writes to the Colonel, and so the Colonel must write for himself: debut novelist Fonseca looks to the golden age of Latin American literature while pondering the mysteries of mathematics.
More to the point, Fonseca, who teaches at Cambridge, limns the mysterious life of the enigmatic mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who, stateless, settled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees and filled thousands of pages with formulas, jottings, and diary entries. In Fonseca’s hands, this untidy, seemingly random archive becomes something of an alternative history of “an imploding century,” a time in which our erstwhile mathematician, a “monastic aristocrat” who answers to Colonel for reasons unknown, has seen manifold terrors, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam. The Colonel, for whom the adjectives mount in variety and number as the story progresses, nurses memories and perhaps a few hallucinations. Though the narrative centers closely on him, he is not alone: among other characters, there is an elusive refugee named Chana Abramov, whose monomania is to paint landscape after landscape of a volcano that she once populated with humans, then erased them one by one. Then there is pen pal Maximiliano Cienfuegos, who, having once played a game of chess with the Colonel, now receives packages from him for reasons unknown; “perhaps the colonel believed he heard aristocratic echoes in Maximiliano’s name,” writes Fonseca, “the irony of a name that played with a history, now almost forgotten, of impossible emperors and transatlantic projects.” Readers without groundings in Latin America will know little of that history, which, Fonseca’s novel insists, is fully part of the larger history of the world. Though the novel nods mostly to García Márquez, Fonseca plays with the possibilities of hypertext raised by Julio Cortázar, and there are hints of Bolaño and perhaps even of younger contemporary Daniel Galera (the latter in the Colonel’s diagnosis of prosopagnosia).
Sometimes precious and perhaps a little too short to contain all the author’s ambitions. Still, a lively, smart study of a decidedly offbeat character.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63206-105-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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