An extraordinarily beautiful depiction of an extraordinarily ugly—and wholly credible—world in the making.
A bleakly brilliant novel of a near future in which humankind has descended into unspeakable brutality.
Catalan poet Guasch makes his fiction debut with this elegantly lyrical view of a world torn apart by an unspecified catastrophe: a plague, perhaps, or climate change. Either way, people hide in dark rooms during the day as wolves descend from the hills, “striding among the houses.” The narrator has remained in his little sun-blasted village to take care of his mother, widowed after her husband’s desperate suicide. Resigned to the world’s terrors, Mom has taken up with a fascist beast whose “head is shaved, like all of them,” servant of a new regime emblematized by a mysterious place called the Factory. The narrator, meanwhile, yearns for his boyfriend, Boris, to whom he writes lovely, evocative letters: “I love you the way we love those who’ve left long ago,” he writes, “and those who haven’t yet arrived….” Boris has relocated to a distant city where life is perhaps a tiny bit better—or so the narrator finds after, in a moment worthy of Cormac McCarthy on the one hand, he dispatches his mother’s suitor and then, evoking Albert Camus on the other hand (“Mother died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don’t know”), desultorily seeks a place to bury her after he reunites with Boris, a distant and often sullen young man who has his own priorities. Throw in a little Mad Max-ish chaos of roving gangs, and it’s amazing that anyone or anything can survive, not to mention the narrator’s love for Boris, which, he slyly notes, “dared not speak its name.” Intimations of other European modernists—Schnurre, Dürrenmatt, Cela—resound quietly throughout a text punctuated by museum-worthy photographs to stunning, memorable effect.
An extraordinarily beautiful depiction of an extraordinarily ugly—and wholly credible—world in the making.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780374612955
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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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