No great novel, but could maybe make a nifty telenovela.
The adventures of several Cuban immigrant women in America are affectionately depicted in this colorful debut from a Cuban-born journalist and former TV scriptwriter.
Its central protagonist is Graciela Altamira, beautiful young mother of two sons, who is separated from her schoolteacher husband Ernesto and working in a doll factory in Union City, N.J. Graciela tells her own story, juxtaposed with the narrations of her fellow townswomen (from the nondescript village of Palmagria) and coworkers, hot-tempered Imperio and her kinder, gentler counterpart, Caridad. Their drab lives are enriched by their shared obsession with the Spanish-language telenovelas whose feverish romanticism cunningly exploits viewers’ hopeful anticipation of the moment in each series “when the first kiss between our favorite new couple would take place.” But television dramas are no match for Graciela’s passionate history, as the unlikely second spouse of a passive widower, the lover of Palmagria’s predominant young stud (Pepe) and—in a twist none of the women has foreseen—the chosen beloved of their very definitely un-Latino shop foreman Barry O’Reilly, meaning (they realize with horror) that “Graciela was going to be our supervisor.” A lot of this is quite entertaining, but the gradually assembled picture of the Castro revolution’s devastating effect on close-knit Cuban families is overdone, and Santiago finds himself still scrambling to layer in expository information more than halfway through. Nice characterizations throughout help, however, as do a handful of capably paced and detailed sequences (in the best of them, an extended flashback, Imperio takes her ailing husband Mario to a santería priest for a most unconventional cure). Santiago’s novel pales in comparison with its presumable model, Mario Vargas Llosa’s comic masterpiece Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter—but then what doesn’t?
No great novel, but could maybe make a nifty telenovela.Pub Date: July 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-01412-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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