A precise, unsettling (if somewhat overlong) study of loss and duplicity. Cameron, the author of several well-received novels (The Weekend, 1994, etc.) and story collections (Far Flung, 1991, etc.), sets this terse work in the tiny country of Andorra, a mountainous, pocket-sized nation wedged between France and Spain. Alex Fox, his disaffected narrator, arrives there fleeing some at first unspecified horror, and finds the carefully ordered, slightly eccentric society of Andorra to be both enticing and soothing. He falls in with the Dents, a handsome, charming Australian couple who, separately, set out to seduce him. And he in turn begins to pursue the beautiful, hesitant Jean Quay, a young woman who seems to be locked in a constant struggle to suppress some disturbing incident in her past. Cameron deftly introduces a grim subtext to Alex's amours: The bodies of several men, strangled to death, wash up on a nearby beach. Ricky Dent disappears, and his frantic wife and a coolly charming policeman both wonder whether Alex has had something to do with it. Dent reappears but, convinced that he will be arrested for the murders, flees. Alex, who had come to Andorra looking for the solace of anonymity, allows himself to drift into an affair with the not-terribly-distraught Mrs. Dent and to entertain the idea of settling down with Jean. But things quickly go wrong. Alex, protesting his innocence, becomes the police's prime suspect in the murders. He isn't guilty, but an even more horrendous crime in his past spurs him to attempt to flee. That crime is revealed only at the last, and Cameron does a very deft job of gradually peeling away the seeming charm of the place and its inhabitants to uncover some nasty secrets underneath. While the pace occasionally lags toward the climax, Cameron's sly, complex characters, wonderfully intelligent dialogue, and masterful pacing combine to create a cumulatively powerful tale of the unforgiving workings of fate. (First printing of 25,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-10505-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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