Polished if not precisely “light” comedy from an accomplished literary novelist who knows how to entertain.
Disorganized crime and lunatic melodrama share the spotlight in this prizewinning 1996 novel by the clever Spanish author (The Year of the Flood, 1996, etc.).
The story is set in Catalonia: specifically, Barcelona and the nearby resort town of Masnou, in the late 1940s, when Spain languishes under Franco’s postwar fascist regime. Popular playwright Carlos Prulla involves himself with rehearsals of his newest comedy (Arrividerci, Pollo!)—as well as with inept actress Lili Villalba, who’s also the plaything of the Prulla’s financial backer, crime boss Ignacio Vallsigorri. The latter turns up murdered, Prulla is suspected, then finds himself harassed by a down-to-earth police inspector and a hilariously righteous priest who urges Carlos to stop pleading innocence and accept punishment he deserves anyway, for writing such godless trash. And, in fact, Prulla’s play—rehearsals of which are interspersed with other actions—is a piece of largely plagiarized hackwork involving multiple murders, identity theft, and byzantine upstairs-downstairs intrigue. What Prulla doesn’t know is that Inspector Verdugones is keeping tabs on him because he’s acquainted with several pleasure-loving aristocrats involved in a royalist plot to depose Franco. Add to this a scheme to bring flour (a scarce postwar commodity) to Spain from South America by subverting a United Nations boycott, and you have more than enough for a carousel of a plot that moves at lightning speed and scatters bodies about imperturbably. Clueless Carlos is a splendidly amoral antihero; it’s impossible not to sympathize with his guilty bewilderment as the law’s noose appears to tighten, and the fallout from his dalliances with half a dozen fetching women (including his long-suffering wife Martita) threatens even direr consequences. It’s all enormous fun, though you may want to scribble notes and draw charts while endeavoring to comprehend its multiplying intricacies.
Polished if not precisely “light” comedy from an accomplished literary novelist who knows how to entertain.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-09-944898-X
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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