A high-concept pastiche: part thriller, part romance, part parable, part darkest-Africa adventure. If it doesn’t quite have...
A ghostwriter’s ghostwriter hires on to save a man from hanging in this sly import first published in Spain in 2005.
Tommy Thompson is a young English writer desperate to be published. He’ll do anything and write anything to make that happen. Through a Faustian portal enters Frank Strub, a ghostwriter’s ghostwriter who proposes that Tommy become ghostwriter to a ghostwriter to…and so it goes. Atop this ghostly totem pole perches that prince of pulp Luther Flag, whose name on a book cover in the England of 1914 has Oprah-like potency, and whose current bestseller, Pandora in the Congo, turns out to be talismanic for Tommy. It leads him to Edward Norton, the barrister charged with representing the sorely beset Marcus Garvey, who’s about to be tried for the double homicide of the aristocratic Craver brothers, mindless Richard and cunning William. The smart money heavily favors the noose. So hard-pressed is Norton for a defense that he conceives the bizarre notion of novelizing his case by hiring Tommy to ghostwrite the Marcus Garvey story, making it sympathetic, making it heartbreaking, making it clear that homicide is as inimical to Garvey as it would be to, say, the saintly hero of Pandora. Tommy enlists in the cause, but as he labors an unforeseen and certainly unbecoming alchemy takes place: He finds that he’s writing a love story. More problematically, he discovers that he’s telling the story of his own love for Garvey’s heroine.
A high-concept pastiche: part thriller, part romance, part parable, part darkest-Africa adventure. If it doesn’t quite have the pop of Piñol’s debut (Cold Skin, 2005), that’s probably because it’s more than twice as long.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84767-187-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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