Stories that will delight readers crushed under the weight of the contemporary world.
Brazil-born Lima explores questions of identity, politics, and creativity through a surrealist lens in these short stories.
The Devil is a recurring figure in Lima’s collection, sometimes appearing as a figure of intrigue, other times as a source of inspiration. In the opening story, "Rapture," the main character is not a writer when she first meets the Devil, “at least not openly so.” And yet, “the Devil had known...the space she had inside her to carry her stories. He had known her hunger.” As if a telepathic confidant, the Devil intuits who the writer is before she herself knows and helps instruct her on how to fulfill her creative vocation. Lima sometimes features characters in the very process of writing, as in “Ghost Story,” in which the narrator “type[s] ‘Ghost Story’ at the top of the page and wonder[s] where to start.” While her characters may not know what should come next, Lima adroitly comments on everything from MFA workshops to Brazilian politics with cheeky aplomb. Though this is not an overtly political book, the specter of neoliberalism in both Brazil and the U.S. hovers on the periphery of many stories. Often, the hellscape of global politics occurs on the television in another room, an ongoing commentary that is ever present, though muted like white noise. The personal becomes political within literary spaces where “sometimes, when the immigrant writer wrote, there was no migration in the story, and she wondered if there should be. Sometimes the immigrant writer wrote immigrant stories and wondered if she shouldn’t. These were the kind of questions she talked about with the Devil.” Who gets to tell certain stories and why? The book’s title evokes both guile and labor, cunning and skill. The dream for Lima’s characters, plagued by global pandemics and wealth disparities, is not health or fame, but writing. Art may not save us from the Devil or hell on earth, but it can come close.
Stories that will delight readers crushed under the weight of the contemporary world.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781250292971
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
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
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