An intensely conceived study of the varieties of contemporary religious experience that teases the mind intriguingly while never quite fully becoming the fiction it aspires to be. The story begins in the fall of 1999, with the random notebook jottings of a writer seeking a fictional subject, meanwhile worrying the idea of the physical universe’s “profound, disastrous, hopeless infinitude,” and what this may imply about the indifference, malevolence, or perhaps nonexistence of God. A subject soon presents itself: a brass cross disappears from St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, then inexplicably turns up on the roof of the nearby Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. The writer, Everett, makes the acquaintance of Episcopal priest Thomas Pemberton, a freethinking cleric distrusted by his superiors, with whom Everett exchanges life stories. The novel exfoliates ambitiously, as Pemberton bonds impulsively with the Synagogue’s Rabbi Joshua Gruen and his wife Sarah (herself a rabbi); then, following Joshua’s death during a “mission” to Europe, Thomas and Sarah fall in love, and Thomas begins the (literally) soul-searching process of converting to Judaism. Against this spare fictional framework, Doctorow (The Waterworks, 1994, etc.) counterpoints eloquently phrased and argued related “documents”; the story Sarah’s elderly father tells of his experience of the Holocaust; Everett’s re-creations (in free verse form) of his father’s and brother’s service in both world wars, and his own in Vietnam; his sardonic interpretations of the religious meaning implicit in American popular songs (such as “Me and My Shadow”), the avocation of birdwatching, and the culture of movies; and'in the boldest imaginative stroke'his invention of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary, which opposes to the Nazis’ destructive Weltanschauung an impassioned defense of the inquiring mind’s potential for creativity. City of God both is and isn’t a dramatization of the experience of questioning, losing, then partially regaining one’s faith. There’s something to pique and challenge the reader’s imagination on virtually every page. But, like the novel it most resembles (Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five), what it actually dramatizes is its own (failed but fascinating) attempt to organize its own teeming content into fictional form.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44783-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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