Hard on the first English trade publication of any of the 1988 Nobel prize-winner's fiction (The Thief and the Dogs, Wedding Song, and The Beginning and the End—not reviewed) comes this first volume of his celebrated Cairo Trilogy, written in 1952 and originally published in Arabic in 1956. The complete trilogy takes the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad from WW I to the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk. The opening of this first installment finds pious, licentious al-Sayyid Ahmad ruling his family with an iron hand: his wife Amina passively accepts his nightly absences without any idea how much more gregarious he can be than the tyrant she knows; his sons Yasin, Fahmy, and Kamal tremble in his presence and accept his orders without question even though they're aware of his sexual hypocrisy; his daughter Aisha forgoes a marriage proposal because her older sister Khadija hasn't been spoken for. But al-Sayyid Ahmad's authority is increasingly threatened—when he sends his wife away for making a forbidden trip outdoors in his absence, her sons send intermediaries to plead for her; Aisha is pressed to accept a second proposal; Yasin, bored with his arranged marriage, rapes his wife's servant; and Fahmy joins a nationalist group organizing against the British soldiers who lounge outside al-Sayyid Ahmed's house on Palace Walk—until finally he must accept the ultimate chastisement: one of his children is buried in a public ceremony, and not as his child. The leisurely pace of the long opening can be tough going, but Mahfouz gradually weaves his fractious family's history together with that of their troubled, splendid country with a mastery that recalls the Don saga of Mikhail Sholokov. The remaining volumes of the trilogy are due for publication on New Year's 1991 and 1992—reason enough for celebration.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1989
ISBN: 0385264666
Page Count: 510
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1989
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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