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THE MORTIFICATIONS

Name: THE MORTIFICATIONS
Author: Derek Palacio
ISBN: 978-1-101-90569-2

by Derek Palacio ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016

Searching, heartbreaking, and achingly beautiful, the novel is as intimate as it is sweeping.

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A powerful family saga, Palacio’s gorgeous and challenging debut follows the Encarnacións as they navigate the space between Hartford, Connecticut, and their native Cuba.

In 1980, Soledad Encarnación gathered her children, twins Ulises and Isabel, and emigrated from Cuba to the U.S., members of the “now-infamous” Mariel Boatlift. Her husband, Uxbal, though, resisted and then refused. “Kingdoms, he said, are hard to come by,” and indeed, “he was so certain of his position that he’d tried holding his daughter ransom....Soldedad was able to retrieve the girl only by holding Ulises hostage in return.” And so the family is split: Uxbal remains in Buey Arriba while Soledad takes the children past Miami, with its waiting Cuban community, and on to Hartford, where her “second cousin knows some people.” There, she establishes herself as a court stenographer, eventually beginning a romance with Henri Willems, a Dutch horticulturalist haunted by his family’s past. Ulises, star of his school’s Latin program and growing enormous, finds a home working Willems’ tobacco fields. “His logic was that he could scrape together a father, his old father, from bits of the Dutchman; he could resuscitate memories and eventually recall something of Uxbal besides the portrait lurking about his brain,” Palacio writes. Meanwhile, Isabel devotes herself to the dying. Her spiritual hunger is powerful, often unsettling; at 18, despite her family’s protests, she joins a convent, taking vows of chastity, poverty, and silence. But their tenuous American equilibrium is disrupted when a letter arrives from Uxbal, reasserting his existence and, unexpectedly, inadvertently, calling the family home. The fates of the Encarnacións, it becomes clear, are inextricably linked with Cuba and with each other. Palacio’s writing is deceptively simple and startlingly original, and his characters, raw, almost mythic in scope, hang on long after the last page.

Searching, heartbreaking, and achingly beautiful, the novel is as intimate as it is sweeping.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-90569-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown

Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.