THE MATTER OF DESIRE

Name: THE MATTER OF DESIRE
Author: Edmundo Paz Soldán
ISBN: 0-618-39557-1

by Edmundo Paz Soldán ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2004

Pedro, like all overly cerebral protagonists, thinks more than he acts, and when he does act, he often gets it wrong. In...

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A tale of equivocal heroes, treacherous revolutionaries, and rejected love as an intellectual struggles to learn the truth about his family.

Bolivian author Paz Soldán, currently teaching at Cornell, evokes a gritty urban milieu permeated by pop culture and technology as he tells the story of thirtysomething Pedro Zabalgo. An assistant professor with a Berkeley Ph.D., Pedro is teaching courses in Latin American politics at the University of Madison in upstate New York, where he has met and fallen in love with graduate student Ashley. In alternate chapters, Pedro recalls how he met Ashley, how they fell in love, and how their affair developed. Now on sabbatical in Rio Fugitivo, Bolivia, Pedro is trying to find out the truth about his father, Pedro Reissig, who was a revolutionary hero of the 1970s, as well as author of the cult novel Berkeley, which, with cryptic references and ambiguous protagonists, evokes the turbulent years he spent studying, like his son, at Berkeley. Before he left Madison, Pedro broke up with—but can’t forget—Ashley, who subsequently has married another man. Memories of her, and uncertainties about the circumstances of his father’s death, preoccupy him, and he finds it difficult to begin his search. His father, whose body was never found, was believed to have been betrayed by a colleague who led the government soldiers to their meeting place. As he pores over Berkeley for insights into his father, and advises a druglord on his memoirs, there are mysterious bombings in the city. Pedro also hears conflicting stories about his father and begins to suspect his uncle David, a noted setter of cryptic puzzles and the only conspirator to have survived, of being responsible for the old man’s death.

Pedro, like all overly cerebral protagonists, thinks more than he acts, and when he does act, he often gets it wrong. In all: more craft than art.

Pub Date: April 5, 2004

ISBN: 0-618-39557-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NORTE
by Edmundo Paz Soldán translated by Valerie Miles

- BOOK REVIEW
TURING’S DELIRIUM
by Edmundo Paz Soldán & translated by Lisa Carter

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

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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.