A poised and effective Rashomon-style exploration of multiple psyches.
One man’s amnesia prompts divergent and sometimes-conflicting remembrances from those close to him.
The central figure in this plainspoken but psychologically penetrating novel (the first in a trilogy) is David, who has lost his memory in an accident and places a notice in the paper requesting letters detailing his past. Three step up: Arvid, David’s stepfather and dying vicar in their small Norwegian town, and a pair of childhood friends, Jon and Silje. Tiller’s strategy is to establish a kind of public persona for each of them—Arvid cold and aloof, Jon antisocial and self-pitying, Silje free-spirited—and then muddy and blur that simplistic portraiture. Jon, for instance, is indeed an impossibly needy and sour musician—as the novel opens he’s called out on this by other members of his band, which he promptly quits—but his stories of his past and present reveal a struggle with family bullying, his lust for David, and an awareness of his inability to check his anger. And his story casts doubts on Arvid’s and Silje’s versions, just as theirs do his. (Did Jon truly have a fling with David, or was it just wishful thinking?) As with a Norwegian contemporary, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Tiller believes the path to interior insight comes via a straight march through unadorned detail: Arvid’s agony over his lost faith and David’s adolescent dark obsessions resonate with his painful stint in a hospital for cancer treatment, and Silje’s recollections of David’s malicious pranks (like leaving a ladies’ scarf on the scene of a man’s car accident to imply an affair) echo her crumbling marriage. There are still unresolved questions for the next two books to deal with, the identity of David’s biological father first among them, but this by itself is a wholly satisfying story about how unreliable narrators tell tales not just about events, but about our core emotions.
A poised and effective Rashomon-style exploration of multiple psyches.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-762-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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