by Sarah Stark ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2014
An ambitious novel with a distinct narrator and fresh voice.
A quirky war veteran goes on a pilgrimage to meet his hero, the author Gabriel García Márquez, in this poetic debut novel.
Jefferson Long Solider has returned home after two tours in Iraq. The young veteran steps off a plane in Albuquerque, N.M., and begins to chant, “I am Jefferson Long Soldier, and I am returned from WA-AR.” It’s the first of many chanting scenes in a journey steeped in elements of magical realism, echoing Jefferson’s obsession with García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He carries the book with him wherever he goes, refers to its author as “GGM” and is certain that it has saved his life. His grandmother Esco and his cousin Nigel welcome him home and anxiously wait to see how the war has changed him. While in Iraq, Jefferson began to record each death he witnessed, and the list begins to haunt him; what should be a triumphant return from war becomes a painful, restless ordeal. Jefferson finds Dr. Monika, an unorthodox “pseudo-doctor” who allows him to chant and talk about his transformative belief in García Márquez’s novel, after which he finds his next step is clear: He must ride Nigel’s motorcycle to Mexico City and see the author in person. Stark presents a largely interior journey, with long passages describing the landscape (“Jefferson could think of nothing in the world he wanted to do as he gazed at the snow-tipped mountains way off in the distance”) and ruminating on García Márquez’s work, although the best storytelling occurs during scenes of action. Jefferson’s adventures are often dreamlike, and some may actually be dreams: At one point, he’s captured by bandits and nearly executed; at others, he’s fed and loved by beautiful twin women and helps a mother deliver a baby in a forest. As the lines blur between Jefferson’s physical journey and his spiritual quest, he eventually finds a purpose for all his stories. The novel’s textual dialogue with One Hundred Years of Solitude is significant, and it’s an ambitious conceit. However, readers who aren’t familiar with that masterpiece may get mired in the details, as Jefferson’s own life story sometimes gets lost. Still, the story’s happy ending is richly deserved.
An ambitious novel with a distinct narrator and fresh voice.Pub Date: April 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991410507
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Leaf Storm Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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