by Gabriel García Márquez ; translated by Anne McLean ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024
Of some interest to Gabo completists, but casual readers will want to take in his classics first.
García Márquez tries his hand at a steamy potboiler, for better or worse.
“This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” So declared García Márquez, tinkering with this novella until his agent quietly approached an editor to help find an ending. The author had a point, but his sons and heirs, “in an act of betrayal,” as they write, put the book into print all the same. It’s not bad, but it’s far from Gabo at his best, a thinly sketched tale of an elegant woman with “pert breasts” who travels to a Caribbean island each August to visit her mother’s grave, staying always in the same hotel for a few days, then returning to her bourgeois married life in the city. She sets eyes on a younger man, and he on her, and soon the two are in flagrante: “She wanted to attack, but he revealed himself to be an exquisite lover who raised her unhurriedly to the boiling point.” All’s well until morning, when 46-year-old Ana Magdalena Bach discovers that he’s gone but has left money behind in payment for the good time. Money was not Ana’s intent, and it rankles, but all the same she returns year after year, having a quickie romance each time. The story has all the makings of a telenovela, but with a memorable ending that turns on a brilliantly macabre moment. Think of it as a more lyrical version of the 1978 rom-com Same Time Next Year, with perhaps a hint of “A Rose for Emily” and Belle de Jour in the mix: Most of the characters remain ciphers, but one senses that had García Márquez lived long enough to finish the book, he would have given them depth.
Of some interest to Gabo completists, but casual readers will want to take in his classics first.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801994
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
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National Book Award Finalist
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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