These inventive novellas are like literary puzzles for the reader to tease out.
Two novellas that challenge the chronological conventions of narrative.
This slim volume from a veteran Brazilian novelist (and film critic and diplomat) pairs two works from different eras: the 2020 title novella, translated by Hastings, followed by Blue Butterflies of the Amazon from 1996, translated by Neves. They are very different, though both feature a character who has suffered a stroke, and each concerns some interplay of chance and fate. The Impostor offers a first-person narrative by a veteran translator taking a trip to Italy with his wife. His impetus for the journey is to visit Vesuvius, where his great-granduncle fell into the volcano. Or jumped—accident or suicide? It was long ago and long forgotten, but the incident has fresh resonance for the protagonist, who had recently suffered what he insists on calling “a neurological issue. A minor one,” in which he “disappeared someplace” for 20 days. The narrative flows across time and space, from descriptions of the Italian vacation to visits with the therapist who is trying to help him account for that lost time to bonding with his 16-year-old grandson. (The two of them smoke a joint and play video games, providing additional narrative confusion.) He also conjures characters, perhaps in dreams, who seem to know him, though he doesn’t know them. Are they impostors? Or is he? By the end it appears that the trip he has been recounting is one he is still anticipating. The second, earlier novella focuses on sexual transgression across a couple of generations. An award-winning young scientist and his wife have returned to his family home to help his father after his mother suffered a stroke that has left her almost comatose. But she observes way more than she can communicate and more than her oblivious son does. Each of the four characters alternate narrating from their very different perspectives, with surprising results.
These inventive novellas are like literary puzzles for the reader to tease out.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781954276154
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
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
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