Different time period, but the message is still the same and as bleak as Peckinpah’s: Even a world of thieves needs...
Blake makes a small leap from the grotesquely amusing Roaring Twenties’ crime-spree scene in A World of Thieves (2002), switching to Depression-era Texas with a Tex-Mex cast.
Mexico’s in mid-Revolution in 1914, and gunfire in Juàrez can be heard across the Rio Grande at Mrs. O’Malley’s whorehouse in El Paso, when Pancho Villa himself comes to bed his choice gringo, the freckled Irish redhead Megan. He comes with Rodolfo Fierro, who just that day has killed 300 Federal prisoners before coming to Mrs. O’Malley’s. Something fiery about Fierro causes his whore, Spooky Ava (real name: Ella), to remove her pessary and go for love. Pregnant, she marries rancher Cullen Youngblood and gives birth to James Rudolph Youngblood. Our only hint about her past is that she was once thought crazy. On New Year’s Eve 1936, we meet Jimmy, now 21, in the Free State of Galveston, the nation’s most wide-open gambling city, and, as we meet Jimmy the Kid, who has graveyard eyes, he’s driving an ice pick into Willie Rags’s heart. Jimmy’s an enforcer, bagman, and bodyguard for Rose and Sam Maceo, who suck up all the gambling profits on the island and in Galveston County, and Willie Rags worked for foolish folk trying to muscle in on Maceo territory. Sam does the glad-handing and charitable handouts for public welfare, and Rose is the strong-arm, assisted by his Ghosts, who also help keep the local crime rate down. Jimmy is Rose’s personal bodyguard, at times assisted by fellow Ghosts Raymond Brando (not Don Corleone but a great mimic) and LQ (from Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country). Rags’s rival mob in Houston wants its slots back. Bloody business affairs follow. Then Jimmy meets skin-tingling Daniela Zarate, whom he dives into Mexico to save.
Different time period, but the message is still the same and as bleak as Peckinpah’s: Even a world of thieves needs rules—and loyalty.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-380-97751-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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