by Gustavo Faverón Patriau ; translated by Joseph Mulligan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2014
Rarely does a literary mystery work on as many levels as this.
A masterful debut in which a Peruvian literary critic and scholar crafts a metamystery that explores identity, deceit, guilt and narrative.
The plot seems simple enough, until it doesn’t. Narrator Gustavo (who has the same first name as the author) is a psycholinguist who receives an out-of-the-blue call from his closest friend, Daniel, with whom he’s had no contact for three years. Daniel apparently wants to talk about what happened back then, when he was accused of killing his fiancee in a jealous rage and subsequently attempted suicide, and what has happened since, during his confinement in a mental hospital. From that setup, strands of narrative intertwine: stories of Gustavo and Daniel in the formative days of their friendship; stories of Daniel and his disturbed sister, who disappeared; stories about Daniel’s obsession with older books, which somehow involves him in a “mafia that traffics in human body parts.” Interspersed with these stories are fables and parables from the novel’s title character, who merges with one of its main characters. Against a backdrop of clashing armies and acts of terrorism, Gustavo and Daniel resume their relationship, with the former starting to feel like a “fictional detective” who “felt more like I was being played with by an army of hooded puppeteers.” Is Daniel the one pulling those strings? Did he commit the murder to which he confessed? Has he committed others? Daniel has plainly enlisted Gustavo to find out something, but what if Gustavo’s discovery incriminates Daniel? As one character suggests, “[t]he moments from the past or from the future, the unreal scenes from tales, dreams, the projects we push aside each day that exist in the doubt we stop having in order to live—they’re all worlds as true as this one.” Within these worlds, the novel finds a provisional truth.
Rarely does a literary mystery work on as many levels as this.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2160-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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