A valedictory work full of erudition and heart.
The late, great Mexican novelist and critic (1928-2012) offers a personal history of the fiction he admired.
Fuentes (Destiny and Desire, 2011, etc.) has few harsh words for anyone in this history (though he calls some work by Ken Follett “startlingly bad”), which commences in the 16th century with Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, a work that Fuentes identifies as the first novel of Latin America. Early on, the author begins referring to some literary lions who roared elsewhere, writers to whom he returns throughout this richly detailed and idiosyncratic work—among them, Cervantes, Proust, and Faulkner. In many ways a scholarly work as well, the text alludes to Max Weber, Erasmus, Rousseau, and other intellectual notables. Fuentes writes frequently about the novelists’ use of time, place, and, most of all, language. The organization is chronological at first and later, geographical, as he looks at the novels of writers from Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru, and elsewhere. (He admits a sort of “Mexican bias,” but he also spends a lot of time with Argentinian writers.) Fuentes is also aware of a male dominance and makes a serious effort, especially in the final quarter of the book, to highlight novels by women. Effusive praise appears often, and he features such locutions as, “his prose is as bright and clear as day,” and “a brilliant, richly textured book.” A subtitle for this book could be Novels I Have Loved. Fuentes occasionally offers declarations about the novel (“There can be no literature without the body”) and also provides, in instructional fashion, lists of writers and works and commonalities among them. In moments that have enormous contemporary resonance, he argues powerfully for the great advantages of immigration.
A valedictory work full of erudition and heart.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-130-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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