A bleak fable that honors the poetic spirit, recognizing lyricism and metaphor as dangerous tools of defiance.
A young poet’s muse is slowly stifled as the Castro regime takes power in Cuba.
If this novel by the veteran poet, novelist, and translator (The Island Kingdom, 2015, etc.) qualifies as a “comedy,” it’s of the most melancholy and bittersweet sort. Its hero, Elena, has grown up in a rural patch of the island, the daughter of the maker of an infamously potent firewater. Dad suggests that her budding love of poetry at 17 is the real danger, though. She’s “infected with something more terminal than death,” and he means it: Elena’s verse for a time turns the town into sex-obsessed layabouts and catches the attention of Daniel, a mesmerizing “Bard of the Revolution” who awards her a national poetry prize. In the interior and for a time in Havana, Elena’s life feels charmed and strange in ways that evoke the 1960s Latin Boom. Her father’s cousin is a healer who speaks in a patois of Latin, Spanish, French, and English; she falls for a comically well-endowed man who quits his firewater habit before they marry, have a daughter, and he dies; in Havana, she’s taken in by a couple that keeps a coop full of pigeons and a parrot with the fraught name of Pity. The peculiarity of the narrative becomes deliberately straightforward, though, after she marries Daniel and he falls afoul of Communist leaders and is detained by State Security. Tales of lust and exorcism and flight fade from the narrative, replaced by Elena’s despair that poetry gained her only “a husband in jail and the sword of the state dangling over her.” Rather than get into particulars of how everyday life changed in Cuba by the early '60s, Medina memorably conjures a stark change in atmosphere.
A bleak fable that honors the poetic spirit, recognizing lyricism and metaphor as dangerous tools of defiance.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-87-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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