Vivid, horrific, visionary, disarmingly sentimental tales: let’s hope for a novel to follow soon.
The Pushcart Prize–winning memoirist and poet returns to the barren New Mexico landscape, troubled families, outlaw gangs, and despairing orphanages of his youth.
After recounting his nightmare childhood and criminal past in his superb A Place to Stand (2001), Baca offers a debut collection of eight stories, tales like “Matilda’s Garden,” about a Hispanic farmer, mourning his dead wife, who suffers a violent accidental death that may also have been a miracle. In the title piece, the man’s squabbling children, tempted by the seductions of mainstream American romance and security, nearly destroy their entire village when one of them sells a portion of the farm—until all is saved, once more in a miraculous fashion. In “The Three Sons of Julia,” Baca again mines the theme of antagonistic siblings—one criminally violent and proud of his Hispanic roots, the other educated and shamelessly aspiring to the gringo lifestyle—who drive their mother into a drunken delirium during a wretched family reunion. A Catholic orphanage makes for moments of heartbreaking sadness in “The Valentine’s Card” and for sadistic menace in “Runaway.” Baca is clearly searching for a meaning in the overwhelming cruelty and hardship his characters suffer, whether from their grim addictions to sex, alcohol, and greed, or from an unseen, possibly supernatural hand that guides them to a brutal, optimistic truth. Thus, when three vicious sociopaths are suddenly freed from prison in “Enemies,” the hatred that kept them alive behind bars turns into mutual respect. The only weak entry is “Mother’s Ashes,” a heavy-handed noir vignette of a debauched lawyer hoping to extort sex from a former client. Most impressive is “Bull’s Blood,” a gritty redemption tale about a burned-out, 40-year-old musician and a 20-year-old rodeo sweetheart who realize they love each other after enduring the gory spectacle of a bullfight.
Vivid, horrific, visionary, disarmingly sentimental tales: let’s hope for a novel to follow soon.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1765-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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