A 'plot' is not fiction, as you know, but very real; it is the record of someone's brain, a trail like a snail's trail, sticky and shameful. . . ." And in these often abstract short stories, shame and guilt and the many deaths of personality sever those all-important connections between men and women as they pursue, flee from, and pursue again themselves and each other. The ideal of marriage, a metaphor of union, is the "sacred adventure" never achieved; and infidelity becomes an acknowledgment of the inevitability of doomed isolation and aridity. Love-making on the grass is blown about with Dixie cups and "small plastic spoons." And the woman is an "echo only of his shouts and cries," or those of other men. In "The Sacred Marriage," a dead writer's young wife confers his "divinity" on succeeding lovers; in another story, a fiancee of a dying man leaves the hospital to sleep with his disciple, in "Did You Ever Slip on Red Blood?" the killer of a hijacker searches for the erotic moment of his kill through becoming the lover of the girl who had absorbed the moment of death into her consciousness — "What was it like. . . . When it happened." But the attempt to remain intact is unreal, as in the chilling "The Children" in which a suburban housewife's bastion is ringed with incursions by dirt, strangers, and even the terrifying self-containment of her own children. In Miss Oates' feverish landscapes, the streets are crowded with phantoms seeking out victims, avengers, and those perfect unions which never come about. "You do not exist until you begin to run." Miss Oates in these stories approaches a mystic sin-dense vision in which the marital or adulterous bed is "crammed with people. . . all becoming each other. Becoming protoplasm," beneath the Celestial City. Commanding even if a few stories are only notebook exercises; all press forward into new ground.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1972
ISBN: 0449237249
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1972
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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