Twelve well-paced stories straddling the line between parody, magical realism, mystery, and farce.
Palma, a Spanish writer best known here for the Map of Time trilogy (The Map of Chaos, 2015, etc.), returns with a book of imaginative stories.
In "Snow Globe," one of the stronger tales, a traveling encyclopedia salesman masquerading as the dead son of a senile and grief-stricken elderly woman describes the title item as "a toy world that obeys its own laws….Everything inside it works differently." It's a metaphor for the story at hand, but it could also apply to the book overall. "The Karenina Syndrome" unfurls an enigmatic tale about a man's dread of Sunday dinners with his wife's family into a domestic thriller centered around a love letter bookmarking his in-laws' tattered copy of Anna Karenina, deftly recalibrating the book's themes into something new and alarmingly grotesque. "Roses Against the Wind" expands a similar premise of how little family members actually know about one another into a fantastical meditation on compassion and escapism. But the title story—about a wealthy man who gives his wife pieces of his body over the course of their marriage—is indeed the standout and is practically dripping with black comedy and potential interpretations. Are the eyes, appendages, and limbs passed across the table over lavish dinners indicative of unbridled affection or "an act of tremendous egotism...akin to giving the church the clothes you no longer wear"? In Palma's tales, lecherous co-workers inevitably steal jilted wives waiting at the foot of a staircase with their suitcase, work crushes wind up the talismanic muses of magical figurines—all evoked with an onslaught of metaphor and simile that hits the nail so hard and so frequently that, in aggregate, they have some trouble signifying. Palma has a piercing imagination hampered only by plots that are borderline contrived and an unchanging narrative voice.
Twelve well-paced stories straddling the line between parody, magical realism, mystery, and farce.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6404-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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