A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn’t entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better...
Brilliant evocation of el otro México, “the other Mexico,” by the writer whose inspiration underlies Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Rulfo, who died in 1986, is best known for his odd novel Pedro Páramo, in which ghosts and living beings share the streets of a dusty town out in the middle of nowhere that may or may not belong on this plane of existence. Qualities of that bardolike place are evident in this similarly odd tale of Dionisio Pinzón, a youngish man who sets out to make his fortune in the unpleasant but widespread “sport” of cockfighting. With the long-suffering Bernarda, “a tough and attractive woman with a flashy rebozo worn across her chest,” he travels from town to town, off in the provinces away from the metropolis that, Rulfo suggests, Dionisio barely knows even exists. As he travels, Bernarda turns up at the oddest times; “her calling,” his godfather tells Dionisio, who wonders where he’s seen her before, “is to wander the earth, so it’s not hard to have seen her just about anywhere….” Though his golden cockerel falls in the ring in Jalisco, Bernarda brings him discipline and luck, eventually marrying him not out of love so much as loneliness. For his part, Dionisio, with his huge appetite for success, doesn’t always treat her as well as he should—but winds up, in an ending quite reminiscent of Pedro Páramo, not to be able to live without her. With the novella are collected several sketches and other writings, most of which speak to Rulfo’s preoccupations, chief among them death. “Death is immutable in space and time,” one reads. “It’s just death, without contradiction, not standing in contrast to absence or to presence.” Even so, the narrator warns, it’s bad form to make others weep when you go underground: “It’s a rebuke that endures and that weighs on those who have died.”
A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn’t entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better known.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941920-58-9
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Deep Vellum
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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