A lush fantasy in which a man must unwind time itself to right the world’s wrongs.
A Mexican Vietnam vet searches for redemption through magic after he discovers an ancient time machine.
Defense attorney and novelist Véa (Gods Go Begging, 1999, etc.) dives into magical realism headfirst in this hallucinatory fantasy that reads like a blend of John Steinbeck and Robert A. Heinlein. The book opens on a California vineyard circa 1961 as an orphaned boy named Simon Vegas arrives seeking work. A few days later, a female skydiver plummets to the earth, dying right in front of the boy. Then the novel opens on the present day as Simon’s pregnant wife, Elena, wonders what dark secrets her husband is keeping from her with his project in their garage. Finally, the book spins out the long history of a talisman called “the Antikythera mechanism,” a powerful machine built by the Greek physicist Archimedes that grants the user the ability to travel through time. The device was being used by the U.S. Army in Vietnam when a lowly draftee purloined it—a man who turns out to be Simon. Eventually he enlists his oddball amigo Hephaestus Segundo to help repair the strange machine. From here, Véa contrasts Simon’s pedestrian life—volunteering to teach poetry at a prison, debating with his friend Ezekial Stein, and preparing for fatherhood—with his superheroic adventures using the time machine to intervene in situations where people have been wronged. He saves a boy in Texas from a lynching, rescues Joan of Arc from her pyre, and plots to send the doomed prisoners of Bergen-Belsen to a magical residency in what Simon calls “a section of my Mexican heaven called Boca Raton.” “I think they just live out their lives—the lives they would have had if people had left them alone,” Simon explains. It’s a dizzying novel that combines Véa’s solid prose style with a vivid imagination and an authentic cultural brio.
A lush fantasy in which a man must unwind time itself to right the world’s wrongs.Pub Date: June 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8703-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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