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LIKE THIS AFTERNOON FOREVER

Name: LIKE THIS AFTERNOON FOREVER
Author: Jaime Manrique
ISBN: 978-1-61775-718-1

by Jaime Manrique ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2019

A novel that strives to encompass drug violence, faith, and sexuality, though not entirely cohesively.

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Two friends take divergent paths through the priesthood in war-torn Colombia, keeping their homosexuality under wraps.

Manrique’s sixth novel (Cervantes Street, 2012, etc.) is set against the drug-fueled violence that’s afflicted the author’s native Colombia for decades—families “hacked to pieces” by soldiers, severed heads displayed as threats by bandoleros. The church is one of the few escape hatches out of poverty and bloodshed, so two young men, Lucas and Ignacio, are nudged into the priesthood. They meet in high school in the early 1990s, and though they have different temperaments—Lucas is gregarious and earnest, Ignacio moody and headstrong—they quickly develop a romantic affection for each other that’s complicated by both church doctrine and their different backgrounds. (“[Ignacio] was an Indian and Lucas was a white-looking mestizo,” a particular pressure point for Ignacio.) The two wind up at the same seminary, they launch a relationship, keeping their affair hidden for the next decade and a half while they lead separate parishes in Bogota. (Ignacio’s is a particularly challenging assignment, filled with refugees from drug violence.) Stress, shame, questioning God, and a descent into drugs and reckless sex ensue, which Manrique depicts more in a spirit of lament than moral judgment—the noble urge to do God’s work warps under the pressure to remain chaste and quiet our affections. Still, the story’s arc leans toward melodrama, evoking a bygone era of gay romance where a lover was all but obligated to die for perceived sins. That's tempered somewhat by Manrique's thoughtful use of the theological backdrop following Ignacio’s mournful contemplation of God as a being “drunk on his infinite inventiveness,” using men as playthings.

A novel that strives to encompass drug violence, faith, and sexuality, though not entirely cohesively.

Pub Date: June 4, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61775-718-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Kaylie Jones/Akashic

Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OUR LIVES ARE THE RIVERS
by Jaime Manrique

- BOOK REVIEW
TWILIGHT AT THE EQUATOR
by Jaime Manrique

- BOOK REVIEW
LATIN MOON IN MANHATTAN
by Jaime Manrique

- BLOG
Beyond Nordic Noir: On International Crime Fiction, Part 2

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.