An engaging but subdued portrait of a legend.
Understated novel about the rise and fall of Czech runner Emil Zátopek.
Goncourt winner Echenoz (Ravel, 2007, etc.) recently seems to be specializing in thinly fictionalizing the lives of real people. Zátopek is a good choice for inherent drama; he was at first rewarded and then punished by Communist Party authorities. The decision to reward came easily, for Zátopek astounded all by running. For many years he remained an officer in the Czech army and received a promotion with almost every victory, from European championships to the Olympics. Echenoz emphasizes that Zátopek was not a stylish runner but instead an awkward and ungainly plugger—not pretty to watch but pragmatically effective. For a while he simply couldn’t be beaten, and for more than five years he was the fastest man in the world in long distances. While his specialty was the 10,000 meters, he also showed himself adept at both 5,000 meters and marathons, winning gold medals in all three at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. Eventually, however, age and a punishing training regimen took a toll on his body, and he started to lose. In one telling and sorrowful moment, Zátopek passes through Orly airport on his way to a race in Spain and sees the usual crush of news reporters and photographers. “How kind of them to show up,” he thinks, “it’s always nice to see you haven’t been forgotten.” In fact, he finds, they’re gathered to report on Elizabeth Taylor, who has just flown in from London. When he comments on the Soviet invasion of 1968, his naïve and impolitic remarks lead the authorities to strip him of his army commission and his right to live in Prague, then to banish him to work in a uranium mine.
An engaging but subdued portrait of a legend.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-473-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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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