Perfect for girls growing out of YA titles, and adults will also savor this lovely coming-of-age tale for its elegant...
The young narrator and her native Puerto Rico go through major transitions, in this reflective second novel by Cofer (The Line of the Sun, 1989; stories: The Year of Our Revolution, 1998, etc.).
The rules are very clear in the 1950s, Consuelo shows us as she describes a neighborhood transvestite who is good enough to come to the back door and do her mother’s nails, but “in public we were to pretend we didn’t know him.” He’s a fulano (outsider), and though our narrator is expected to live up to her name and be a consolation to her parents, quietly rebellious Consuelo fears her feelings might also place her outside the strict local order. Her father, maintenance engineer at a San Juan hotel, worships everything American and modern; her mother clings to island traditions. Her younger sister Mili (short for Milagros, “miracle”) is cheerful and light where Consuelo is serious and dark, but Mili’s increasing strangeness is only one of the developments bringing new tensions to the family. “My cousins and I were speaking a language that separated our world from that of our parents,” Consuelo writes, “a slang peppered with terms like ‘rock-and-roll’ that had no direct equivalent in our native tongue.” When Consuelo sleeps with a boy who tells all his friends, she doesn’t die of shame but finds the strength to reject his judgment: “I was not like my mother who had to get the permission of all her relatives and ancestors before making any decisions about her life.” She’s guided by her cousin Patricio, who finds freedom in New York, and by Lucila, a fellow student from the slums who is everything the gente decente in Consuelo’s family scorn. Cofer’s luminous prose anatomizes both the constriction nature of traditional Puerto Rican life and its beauty. We understand Consuelo’s abiding love for her homeland as well as her need to get away.
Perfect for girls growing out of YA titles, and adults will also savor this lovely coming-of-age tale for its elegant language and nuanced but definite judgments about manners and morals.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-20509-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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