GUAPA

Name: GUAPA
Author: Saleem Haddad
ISBN: 978-1-59051-769-7

by Saleem Haddad ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2016

Those looking for a nuanced portrait of gay life in the modern Middle East will find plenty to admire in this flawed but...

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In an unnamed Middle Eastern country, a young translator deals with the fallout after his grandmother catches him with another man.

Set against the backdrop of a country on the brink of civil war, Haddad’s debut novel follows a young gay man, Rasa, over a tense 24 hours. First his grandmother catches him in bed with his lover, then his best friend is arrested at a gay cinema. As Rasa grapples with these conflicts, he also remembers his past—from his sexual awakening to his four years in America for college to experiences at his one refuge, the neighborhood bar/underground gay club that gives the novel its title. Rasa, introspective and witty, makes a sympathetic narrator, and the story is filled with moments of heartbreak and tension (a loaded scene involving Rasa, the Western journalist he translates for, and a husband-wife team of Islamic revolutionaries is especially well-done). But a certain coyness pervades the narrative, at times distracting from an otherwise absorbing story. For a novel so much about place and politics, Haddad’s decision not to identify the Arab country where the bulk of the narrative is set, nor the American city where Rasa studies, is difficult to understand. It also leads to some clunky phrasing: a woman wears a T-shirt “which has the name of the college I went to in America,” etc. More frustrating, at times Haddad seems so bent on saving the major confrontations for novel’s end that early sections become bogged down in bouts of interior monologue. Still, readers will find no shortage of characters they’ll want to spend time with, and a dramatic wedding scene at the end makes up for earlier missteps.

Those looking for a nuanced portrait of gay life in the modern Middle East will find plenty to admire in this flawed but promising debut.

Pub Date: March 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59051-769-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Saleem Haddad

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

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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.