A replete and readable portrayal of a fascinating character, and an all-around terrific novel.
A century’s worth of Mexican culture and politics is observed through the prism of the life of the eponymous protagonist of this big novel, the most lucid and satisfying fiction of Fuentes’s 40-year career (The Crystal Frontier, 1997, etc.).
“The years with Laura Díaz” (which begin in 1905) are “remembered” (as a framing prologue and epilogue reveal) by a young artist who imagines the life of the famous beauty he sees depicted in a mural, then by the descendant who vows he’ll tell her story. Early chapters concentrate on the (often romantic) history of Laura’s aristocratic German-Mexican family, her fascination with an imposing statue of a suffering woman (a resonant omen) encountered in a forest, marriage to an older man devoted to the Mexican Revolution and particularly the sufferings of the working classes, and her flirtation (made possible by the Díaz’s social connections) with Mexico City’s artistic circle. The story picks up considerable steam when Laura becomes an intimate of painter Frida Kahlo and her artist husband Diego Rivera (brought splendidly to life), stalls a bit during her long affair with Spanish diplomat and left-wing activist Jorge Maura (a true believer who’s a bit of a dull dog, for all his emoting and posturing), and recovers nicely when Fuentes focuses on Laura’s combative-loving relationships with her always-preoccupied husband (to whom she nevertheless always returns) and their contrasting sons: frail, sensitive Santiago (the namesake and image of Laura’s beloved half-brother, an early martyr to the Revolution) and extroverted (ironically named) Danton, whose rampant careerism blandly sidesteps all his family’s conflicting ideals. Even better are the final 200 pages, in which Laura becomes involved with American refugees from McCarthyite persecution (including the guilt-ridden film producer who becomes her latest lover), then finds in her 60s the perfect outlet for her complex energies, as well as “independence and fame,” as a successful photojournalist.
A replete and readable portrayal of a fascinating character, and an all-around terrific novel.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-29341-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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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