68482556.299 Offutt, Chris OUT OF THE WOODS Violence, dislocation, the contradictory yearning for sustaining roots and for the rootless freedom of the road, as well as the difficult negotiations between men and women—all figure in this strong and startling collection. Over the course of several books, including a debut collection (Kentucky Straight, 1992), Offut has been working a rich vein of material, dealing with the tough, laconic hill people of Kentucky, and based on the razor-sharp stories here, the vein shows no signs of being played out. The wonderful title tale follows the efforts of a relative newcomer to the culture—the isolated, ancient culture of those hardscrabble hills—as he struggles to adapt himself to his wife’s taciturn, violent family. Sent to bail a brother-in-law out of trouble in another state, he discovers that the man has in fact been shot by his girlfriend, and died. Without cash but determined to impress the family, he manages to wrest the man’s body from officialdom, then haul it home in the back of his pick-up. In “Malungoons,” a deputy who prides himself on having escaped from the lethal feud that has enveloped several families in the nearby hollows finds, in one bloody moment, that he’s escaped his heritage after all. That archaic Kentucky culture, Offutt seems to suggest, is persistent, inescapable: it broods survivors, but it also breeds despair. Even those who seem to escape don’t often manage to evade the kinds of hard blows life seems to reserve for the powerless and poor. In the astringent “Tough People,” a couple on the road, scrambling desperately for a stake, and well aware that most things in life “will out you or burn you,” sign up for “Tough Man” and “Tough Woman” fights to raise money; they get the money but destroy their love in the process. There’s little good news in these nine tales, but there is in compensation ferocious portrait of an otherwise almost invisible culture, rendered in a salty, spare, memorable prose.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82556-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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