A fresh translation of this classic of 20th-century Mexican literature, ready for a new audience to savor.
This coming-of-age story, originally published in 1981, explores the intensity of childhood passion even as it mourns the passing of a version of Mexico City subsumed by the tidal wave of consumer-based globalism.
Carlos is a child of the Mexican middle class, which is made up of “typical wannabes,” according to his brutish older brother, Héctor. During the post–World War II presidency of Miguel Alemán, Carlos’ Mexico City is poised on the dividing line between a way of living informed by traditional culture and the wave of industrialization, importation, and consumer marketing designed to “whiten the taste of the Mexicans.” Carlos’ father owns a failing soap factory which is being outcompeted by North American detergent brands, and his mother “despises anyone who [isn’t] from Jalisco,” which would seem to include Carlos and his younger sister, the only two of her five children not born in Guadalajara. Carlos takes a more egalitarian view of the national and ethnic identities of the people who surround him—whether it is his classmate Jim, who was born in San Francisco and speaks both English and Spanish with no identifying accent; Toru, who is Japanese and spent his early childhood in an internment camp; or scholarship student Rosales, who is from one of the worst slums in the city, Carlos believes that “nobody chooses how they’re born” and manages to float fairly seamlessly among the playground tribes. When Carlos meets Jim’s mother—the beautiful Mariana, rumored mistress of a high-ranking member of Alemán’s inner circle—his aimless drifting develops sudden purpose. In spite of his young age, Carlos falls deeply in love with Mariana. As his passion becomes obsessive, Carlos goes out of his way to gather information about Mariana from her son, to find excuses to stop by Jim’s house after school, and, finally, to sneak out of school in order to confess his love. The subsequent overreaction to Carlos’ actions by his parents, school officials, psychologists, and friends turns the order of Carlos’ life upside down, leading in a circuitous way to the family’s eventual departure from Mexico to a new life as immigrants in America. A tender and unequivocal exploration of the strength of a child’s passion, Pacheco’s work treats the passing of the Mexico City of his youth with the same wistful longing as he does Carlos' love, which, being secret and silent, is the most hopeless type of love and thus also the saddest.
A fresh translation of this classic of 20th-century Mexican literature, ready for a new audience to savor.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3095-7
Page Count: 54
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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