A meditative tribute to perseverance and literary integrity.
A tale of artistic dedication inspired by the life of Roberto Bolaño.
The first novel in English translation by the Spanish-born author Serena isn’t strictly a roman à clef about Bolaño. For one thing, its hero, Ricardo Funes, is Peruvian, not Chilean. But the arc of Funes’ life bears a strong resemblance: an early hand-to-mouth literary apprenticeship in Mexico, a later move to Spain, then an explosion of global success until his career was cut short by illness. Here, Funes’ story is told by three narrators. Fernando, a fellow writer, recalls Funes from his early days in Mexico’s “negacionismo” literary movement that thumbed its nose at the literary mainstream. Funes' wife, Guadalupe, remembers their courtship in Spain and his yearslong efforts to balance his ambitions with marriage and parenthood. And Funes himself concludes with his own moody contemplation on his career. In each case, the prevailing theme is uncompromising commitment to artistic ideals, to the point where Fernando’s descriptions of the writer are nearly Christlike: “He held himself with the gravitas befitting a liturgy: his sandaled feet were planted firmly in the mud....” This sometimes gets repetitive and hagiographic, but Serena is also alert to details that color and complicate Funes’ obsessive character: his determination to woo Guadalupe (a megaphone is involved), his close critical attention to porn films, his needing to email manuscript instructions to his editor even as he nears death. And Serena channels his observations about creativity into elegant sentences (via Whittemore’s translation) that evoke the storm-clouded intensity of Bolaño’s prose in books like 2666. (This is the first of two companion novels by Serena; the forthcoming Atila is about the Spanish writer Aliocha Coll.)
A meditative tribute to perseverance and literary integrity.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948830-32-4
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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