Definitely not hammock reading. This is exhilarating, mind-bending stuff by an author who probes ever deeper into the...
The riddle of creation, and the innumerable natural and man-made shocks the overweening intellect is (so to speak) heir to, are the dominant concerns in this elusive and fascinating metaphysical fiction.
It begins teasingly, with a research scientist’s speculations about the accounts of the creation given in Genesis and other ancient texts, and how these relate to the “story” “told” by the “language” of DNA, as theoretically deciphered by James Watson’s theory of the double helix. Then, in another of the 12 “documents” that make up Mulisch’s text, we learn the story of Rabbi Jehudhah Löw of 16th-century Prague, whose efforts to fashion a golem out of clay (at the behest of his Emperor), and thus ensure the protection of the Jews from persecution, instead produces a homicidal Frankensteinian monster. Thereafter, the novel settles into the extended “confession” of Victor Werker, a microbiologist who’s part of an international team doing DNA research on Egyptian mummies, the hubristic inventor of what he terms the “eobiont” (“the simplest independent life form possible,” which Werker has assembled, in godlike fashion, from inorganic materials), and the bereaved father of a stillborn daughter (mocking proof of his inability to create life after all) to whom he addresses long, analytical letters sent to his estranged wife. All this sounds oppressively dense, but Dutch author Mulisch (The Discovery of Heaven, 1996) uses the complex, self-challenging (and strangely endearing) figure of Werker as the fulcrum of a dazzlingly brilliant fictional structure that is itself a series of “creations”: the original one recorded in the Bible, the construction of an artificial human, the making (that is, the conception, birth, and early years) of Werker himself, and finally his own experiences as a maker—of the aforementioned eobiont, and of the book in which his theories and their consequences are encapsulated and (to a surprisingly successful degree) explained.
Definitely not hammock reading. This is exhilarating, mind-bending stuff by an author who probes ever deeper into the mysteries that matter most—and keeps getting better.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-91024-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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