by Mario Vargas Llosa ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 28, 1998
Vargas Llosa’s most enjoyable novel since his Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982)—with which it shares the motif, used elsewhere in his fiction, of a teenager’s romantic fixation on his beautiful stepmother. The story’s set in Lima, where middle-aged insurance executive Don Rigoberto’s happy marriage to his luscious young second wife Lucrecia (amusingly pet-named “Lucre”) has been temporarily rocked by Lucrecia’s indiscretion with her handsome stepson Alfonso (“Fonchito”), a politely deferential “little pagan god” whose ingenuous questions about male-female interrelationships arouse the distraught Lucrecia beyond boiling point. Simultaneously, Don Rigoberto fills his “notebooks” with impassioned sexual arcana and fantasizing: arguments with a militant “feminist sect”; “diatribes” against “Rotarians,” who repress sexual energies, and “Sportsmen,” who misspend them; and the like. The line between reality and invention is repeatedly blurred, as Vargas Llosa juxtaposes such entries with accounts of Lucrecia’s efforts to resist Fonchito and of her previous a submissions to Don Rigoberto’s erotic importunings (persuading her, for example, to “enact” the subjects of famous infamous paintings, and—in a dazzling illustration of what a great writer can do with an extended dirty joke—to undertake, then describe a “chaste” vacation enjoyed with a former lover). If the Marquis de Sade had had a sense of humor, he might have anticipated such delights as this novel’s urbane fetishism (“A Tiny Foot”), appreciations of love in unexpected places (a “formidable sexual encounter” between mating spiders), and uproarious deadpan dialogue (“I went off last night.”/”Where to, stepmama ?).. It’s all so outrageously entertaining that one must concentrate scrupulously to notice how brilliantly Vargas Llosa uses Don Rigoberto’s notebooks to comment on a daunting variety of general cultural as well as sexual topics. An Anatomy of Eros unlike any other fiction. Its author may need a cold shower; all the fortunate reader needs is the time and place (preferably bed) to sample its very considerable pleasures.
Pub Date: May 28, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-22327-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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