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QUEEN COCAINE

Name: QUEEN COCAINE
Author: Nuria Amat
ISBN: 0-87286-435-9

by Nuria Amat & translated by Peter Bush ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2005

In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.

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A disjointed, dreamlike (and prizewinning) tale by Barcelona journalist Amat descends into the coca farms of Bahia Negra, Colombia.

A Marxist journalist on the lam, Wilson Cervantes and his Barcelonian girlfriend, Rat, have taken refuge in a seaside farm village near his aunt Irma’s house. In the midst of a civil war, the impoverished black planters of this jungle region are at the mercy of those who sabotage the land for their own purposes: the corrupt drug dealers, who descend in airplanes to take the result of the farmers’ hard toil, the salt cocaine, and leave a paltry cut; the ruthless guerrillas, who periodically infiltrate the villages for arbitrary executions; and the paramilitary police, who routinely burn and fumigate the coca and poppy farms. “In his life as an ordinary citizen,” Amat intimates obliquely, Wilson “wrote articles that upset both the army and the guerrilla,” and yet the hot, trancelike state the two lovers fall into gradually obliterates both the reasons for their being in Bahia Negra and any motivation for leaving. Wilson intends to write a novel, yet he drinks heavily and writes nothing, while Rat observes the wacky locals, like young Aida, black Poncho’s third wife (actually his daughter), who witnesses the guerrillas murder him and loses her mind. Aida reveals troubling truths about other executions she’s witnessed and leads Rat to the Dead Women’s Well, where the two watch all-night rumba parties in which coca leaves are purposefully pulverized by the intoxicated dancers for the next stage of treatment. The gathering of menacing forces against the defenseless farmers results in a violent conflagration that finally pulls the narrative out of what has seemed a drug-induced stupor. The translation is awkward, complicated by Amat’s penchant for whimsical metaphors, non-sequiturs, and shifting points of view.

In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.

Pub Date: March 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-87286-435-9

Page Count: 250

Publisher: City Lights

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.