This is a significant addition to South American literature in translation; the breadth of Gallardo's imagination expands...
Rediscovered Argentinian Gallardo's (1931-1988) short story collection pushes the form in new and unexpected directions in her first book translated into English.
Like the work of her more famous contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, Gallardo's writing eschews realism. In "Phases of the Moon," a missionary dies while attempting to baptize a werewolf. In "Things Happen," a pensioner proud of his garden wakes up to find himself, along with his house and yard, "in the middle of the sea." In another story, clouds are revealed to be controlling human affairs: "It's clouds themselves, not the mere factors that form them, that act on the collective events of humanity. They combine them, decide them, precipitate them." Playful and philosophical, many of Gallardo's stories are written in the style of fables. In "The Thirty-Three Wives of Emperor Blue Stone," each brief section is narrated by one of the titular women, not all of whom are fond of their husband: "May he die, defeated....May his sons betray him, and he know it." The story ends with a flash-forward to the emperor's funeral, where "his wives will stand in a row, waiting for their skulls to be broken." Gallardo has a strong, original, unsentimental style—an island with birds flying above it "seemed to move, like a dead rat covered in flies." Stories begin matter-of-factly: "A man spent twenty years making himself a pair of wings," or "A cat escaped from a house full of ornaments," or "I prefer to slit throats, though my marksmanship isn't bad." Moving between fantasy and myth, they explore the points of view of animals real and imagined ("Tall as a hundred trains, the sea serpent lifted her body into the air, and enjoyed the view of infinite sea"), of trains, a lawn, two Danish siblings, artists and prostitutes, a loner at a bar whose "loneliness waited for him just as a car might for others."
This is a significant addition to South American literature in translation; the breadth of Gallardo's imagination expands the canon.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-403-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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
"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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