Brooding and elegant, much against the grain of lighthearted South American love stories like Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt...
A culturally sensitive, quite grown-up story of love across class and ethnic lines in South America, where such things do not go unnoticed.
Arana moves from the Peruvian rainforest, the setting of her novel Cellophane (2006), to the nation’s capital—more specifically, to the neighborhoods ringed by tall wrought-iron fences and concrete walls with which the elite keep out the poor. One such hermetic estate is the home of the Bluhm family, German in their hearts though “raised entirely in Spanish, on Creole food, in the heart of the Inca continent.” Bluhm père isn’t rich, and there are tuition fees to pay to keep his children at the best schools, but he’s well enough off that, when opportunity knocks, he’s prepared to accept the class burden of setting up a casa chica (love nest), a mistress and possibly a second family on the side. Enter Maria Fernandez, an underage dancer in a tango bar, a chola (half-breed), dark-skinned and, naturally, a temptress. He hunts her; she hunts him. Bluhm falls, of course, though a friend warns him, “Don’t mess with children.” Maria notes their many differences, including this: “You live in San Isidro and have ancestors you’d like to write about. I live in Lurigancho—I have no idea where my ancestors are from.” No matter. Love ensues, and with it disaster that unfolds over a narrative covering more than two decades, during which the members of Bluhm’s circle become no more inclined than before to embrace indigenes. (One had considered inviting Maria to a fundraiser for the homeless, but “the more she thought about it, the less she could recall seeing dark-skinned people at any of those affairs, except, of course, as staff.”) Suffice it to say that things do not end well, and for complex reasons that Arana, herself Peruvian, explores with psychological awareness and sympathy.
Brooding and elegant, much against the grain of lighthearted South American love stories like Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-34258-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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