Series editor Kenison makes great claims for this year’s gathering: “You will close this book with a greater sense of who we...
Over half the protagonists of Best American Short Stories 2000 are anything but white middle class: the American short story, this collection suggests, has gone global.
We have, for instance, Chinese-American Ha Jin’s “The Bridegroom,” about the wedding of an unattractive woman to a closeted homosexual in a Manchurian city; Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon’s “Blind Josef Pronek,” the story of a journalist from Sarajevo who haphazardly immigrates to Chicago and works his way into America while watching his country being torn apart on CNN; and Dominican-American Junot Diaz’s “Nilda,” which reprises his narrator, Yunior, while closing the book on Yunior’s cancer-stricken older brother Rafa. Also on hand is Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” (from her Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies), about the relationship between an elderly landlady and her tenant, an Indian newly arrived in turbulent Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969. In Walter Mosley’s “The Fly,” an African-American mailroom worker mistakes a white secretary’s revulsion for him as racial prejudice, while she interprets his innocent crush as sexual harassment. In Marilyn Krysl’s “The Thing Around Them,” a Sri Lankan fears for her son’s life after a friend’s son is dragged to death behind a jeep. The horrors, the absurdities, the perils, and the possibilities of the millennial globe—all are well represented. Several pieces also feature white middle-class protagonists. Michael Byers’s “The Beautiful Days” is a coming-of-ager about a student wrestling with roommates and Herodotus. “Call If You Need Me,” a recently discovered Raymond Carver story, echoes the themes and tones of Carver’s later work.
Series editor Kenison makes great claims for this year’s gathering: “You will close this book with a greater sense of who we are as a nation. . . .” Guest editor Doctorow identifies a formal freedom in today’s short story: a “literary shackle has been broken.” Both claims are borne out, more or less.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-92687-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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