A claustrophobic, depressive story that goes from bleak to bleaker.
A Dostoyevskian tale set in the Mexico City of today, marking a young man’s slide into not meanness but torpor.
Saldaña París’ nameless narrator “never leaves his bed.” He has complicated reasons for this that would keep a psychiatrist busy for a couple of decades, especially since it’s his mother’s side of the bed that he sleeps on. His mother, Teresa, is absent from the first page on, which begins in the year 1994, when the narrator was 10 years old: She has written a letter to the boy’s father whose contents the author releases to the reader bit by bit until we learn that she’s abandoning their bourgeois existence in the little Mexico City neighborhood called Educación and heading off to take up the Zapatista cause with Subcomandante Marcos. The narrator’s older sister, Mariana, reacts in the way of a disaffected teenager: Charged with babysitting while their dispirited father goes off to work each day, she has pizza parties, drinks beer, and smokes with her boyfriend, a hood called Rat, “the leader of a gang of hell-raisers, famous for his precocious consumption of illegal substances,” who has a tiny bit of silver lining in the dark cloud of his soul. The boy hops on a bus bound for Chiapas to try to find Teresa; he does not succeed, and only late in the story does Saldaña París reveal the most tantalizing hint as to her fate. After their father dies, Mariana continues to look after the narrator, who slides into inertia while replicating his father’s bedridden end of life: “Two and a half years on, my existence is, like his during those months, restricted to the width of a bed….I’m able to understand the infinite pleasure my father must have experienced on discovering, after a whole life of work, the sweet honey of immobility.” That sweet honey soon turns acrid, and even though at the end the narrator thinks he might eventually get up, the reader might imagine that he’s lying there still.
A claustrophobic, depressive story that goes from bleak to bleaker.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56689-596-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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