A powerful first novel suffering from weaknesses—winner of Germany's Ernst Willner Prize—describes the final days of WW II from two intriguingly blended viewpoints. The story's primary narrator, Hermann Karnau, is a skilled sound engineer in his late 20s who first drifts toward complicity with the Nazi war machine when he's hired to help rig up a complicated public-address system for a huge political rally. Obsessed by ``the mystery of the human voice,'' Karnau is easily enlisted in increasingly bizarre projects: ``front-line duty'' taping the sounds of combat; recording the voices of dying patients in military hospitals; and, finally, attempting to preserve for posterity the words of the FÅhrer in his bunker as Russian armies approach Berlin. More improbably, Karnau is engaged to tend the five young children of a prominent national figure (identifiable as Joseph Goebbels) whose wife is giving birth again, during which time Karnau befriends the eldest child (and precocious surrogate mother to her younger siblings), eight-year-old Helga—whose narration of the chaos that afflicts her family is juxtaposed with Karnau's story. Though the parallel stories are adroitly distinguished, Beyer waits far too long to inform the reader that Karnau is remembering his version from the vantage point of 1992, when, as a ``retired security man,'' he's obliged to explain the function of a just-discovered ``sound archive'' connected to several municipal buildings in Dresden. Helga's story, by contrast, is presented in real time, as it is happening. Nor is this technical inconsistency the only flaw. The novel is further weakened by the excess space given to Karnau's often redundant ruminations on the natures of sound and speech. Nevertheless, Beyer creates an interest in his characters and makes us fear for them, and he shapes his story toward a nerve- rattling final crescendo. A good novel that might have been a much better one.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100255-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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