A frustrating novel that strains to take on metaphysical questions and the New York art scene.
A successful New York artist, disenchanted with his hedonistic lifestyle and the contemporary art world, begins to lose touch with reality.
Debut novelist Zapata, a contemporary artist born in Spain, invites the reader to follow along as Rodrigo Concepción’s extravagant and debauched life unravels. Part critique of the contemporary art world and part philosophical inquiry into the meaning of life, this novel takes on more than it can chew. It opens in a SoHo loft with 49-year-old Rodrigo hung over and being served his daily “survival kit”—coffee, painkiller, marijuana, and omega-3 pills—by his butler while another of his employees rushes to get him ready for his flight to Art Basel. Besides his staff, Rodrigo’s friends include a billionaire and a pimp. Both attend Art Basel with him, but to Rodrigo everything—the drugs, the alcohol, the art (which is hardly mentioned), the models—is empty and disgusting. Soon after, he has an "amazing and life-changing series of dreams" in which he's in Florence and meets a woman named Carlotta, whom he calls “an ideal and a perfect creation of my mind.” The self-described “matador of art” becomes obsessed with Carlotta and his dream world, shucking his responsibilities and renouncing his old life (the “New York-life nightmare”). What follows is confusing, and it’s unclear whether or not the lack of certainty is intentional. Rodrigo’s character tells more than Zapata shows when it comes to major plot points or themes: “This was my journey, and it had been necessary for me to get to the next level of understanding” or “I’m sensitive. Thoughtful. I’m a divo sometimes, because of my fame and the fact that I can get away with almost anything, but deep inside...I am still humble and my heart is pure.” Rodrigo is unlikable and less self-aware than he’s meant to be, especially when making sweeping statements about women or cringeworthy jokes at the expense of the LGBTQ community.
A frustrating novel that strains to take on metaphysical questions and the New York art scene.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2925-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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