A slender story, impressively economical, that speaks volumes about lives torn by repression.
Chilean actor and writer Fernández explores the dark years of the Pinochet dictatorship in this affecting portrait of childhood friendship.
Estrella González, 10 years old, appears one morning in 1980 at a Santiago school, her right shoe untied, accompanied by a father distinguished by his officer’s cap—a telling detail, for, as Fernández writes, “the new constitution proposed by the military junta was approved by a broad majority.” Outside the doors of the school a totalitarian state flourishes, but within it the children who befriend Estrella, bearing names like Zúñiga, Donoso, and Maldonado, are innocent of politics, absorbed by the video game of the title and other childhood pursuits. The Pinochet regime was infamous for “disappearing” its opponents, but in this slim novella it is Estrella who disappears: “The desk at the back of the classroom sits empty now. For some reason, the girl never occupies it again.” That reason remains hazy, but Estrella reappears in occasional letters and in dreams as her friends grow into young adulthood and take on political lives of their own. Slowly, page after page, the reader learns of the tragedies that beset Estrella, who signs her letters with a star—the meaning of her name in Spanish—even as she reveals bits and pieces of her life: “I should try to obey my dad. He deserves to be obeyed, for me to obey him." Dad has everything to do with Estrella’s sudden departure from school and her friends’ lives; later, the dictatorship finally ends, but the violence of everyday life continues, lending a tragic end to a story that has hitherto unfolded quietly and with only occasional moments of drama. Like compatriot Alia Trabucco Zerán’s recently published novel The Remainder, Fernández takes a sidelong, subtle approach to the grim realities of life in the Chile of her youth, episodes of which, she suggests, figure in her story.
A slender story, impressively economical, that speaks volumes about lives torn by repression.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64445-007-9
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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