An atmospheric, idiosyncratic glimpse of contemporary female lives.
A child’s abduction highlights the gulf separating the lives of the two women who care for her.
In her English-language debut, Brazilian writer Madalosso delivers a story from the alternating perspectives of two women. Maju begins. She’s a maid to Fernanda and Cacá in São Paulo and nanny to their 4-year-old daughter, Cora, and she’s about to kidnap the little girl. Age 44 and childless herself, Maju has spent a lifetime working in the homes of other families; she had a boyfriend for a while, but forfeited that relationship to her work and is essentially alone. Now, she’s taking Cora on a road trip which will go increasingly awry. Fernanda relies on Maju’s labor to pursue her own career in television—which supports the family and its comfortable lifestyle—and also an absorbing affair with a female lover while her marriage seems to be fading. The women’s voices are alternately indulgent and urgent. The novel is short yet it ranges widely, from Amazon forests to love motels, from taking the hallucinogen ayahuasca to filming alligators. But it returns constantly to its central preoccupations, class and womanhood, the latter considered broadly to include sex after child-bearing, an anthropological scrutiny of female bonobo monkeys, depilation, and the anxious preoccupations of mothers everywhere. Madalosso’s style is modern, fractured, vivid in its devotion to inner fears and fantasies yet open-ended. Fernanda and Maju’s standpoints may be far apart, but both love Cora intensely and both are marked by unsatisfied expectations. Nor does the book resolve them—rather it draws a scenic portrait of contemporary lives and leaves its characters to resume after the pages conclude.
An atmospheric, idiosyncratic glimpse of contemporary female lives.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781609459802
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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