The magical-realist example of Gabriel Garc°a M†rquez is only one of numerous literary influences to be detected (and often proudly displayed) in this exuberantly inventive first novel set in Cuba just before Castro’s Revolution. The action occurs in “the Island,” which is in fact a secluded enclave of Havana founded by “Godfather” Enrique Palacio and his sister Angelique, whose incestuous love bred a —monster” child dead soon after its birth. The Island now houses several eccentric extended families, including that of Cassandra-like “Barefoot Countess” Helena, her black husband Merengue, and his son Chavito, a sculptor whose imitations of familiar masterpieces litter the Island; that of retired opera singer Casta Diva, her inexplicably mute husband and troubled offspring; that of the sisters Mercedes, Marta, and Melissa, all variously deprived of normal health and sexuality; that of spinster teacher Miss Berta and her bedridden nonagenarian mother Dona Juana (a pun?)—these being only some of the principals. EstÇvez throws all together in a yeasty symbolic melodrama festooned with mysterious omens (an interminable rainstorm, a menacing stranger, a “Wounded Boy” evoking martyred St. Sebastian—while, just to complicate things, there are two characters named Sebastian) and skillfully crisscrossing plot lines whose resolutions vividly demonstrate that “Havana is the city where you comprehend, with almost maddening intensity, what it means to be ephemeral.” In addition to his creation of a moribund microcosm ripe for overthrow, EstÇvez offers an amusingly self-reflexive fiction whose engaging author mischievously involves us in his creation (“If the reader has no objection, it can be five in the afternoon”) and suggests through wry parallels (the tale of “Uncle Noel’s” ark, Mercedes’ wish that she were Dostoevsky’s Nastasia Filipovna) that his story is a composite of all earlier ones and he himself a reincarnation of Scheherazade and all the storytellers who followed her. Enticing literary gamesmanship from a remarkably accomplished new novelist.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-451-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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