A moody, spiky yarn of inherited loss and violence.
Sex, revenge, death, and hidden histories populate a rough landscape in this experimental debut.
The first novel by acclaimed young Mexican poet Mendoza opens with two soldiers, Lázaro and Juan, who’ve decided to desert. (No place and time are given, but the era of the Mexican Revolution is a reasonable surmise.) As they wander, they share stories or muse on their pasts, while encountering people with their own pasts to share; they discuss homosexuality, selling their souls to the Devil, and prostitution. Before he dies, Lázaro recalls his urge to locate his father, who abandoned him as a child and violently abused his mother; discovering he had the same father, Juan heads to the desert to track him down and kill him for “sowing the seed of his cursed bloodline everywhere he passed.” This spine of a plot, however lurid, matters less than the lyrical, phantasmagoric, symbolic tenor of the prose, through which Mendoza explores the fragile, fluid nature of the human body. Characters shift gender and even species, morphing from dog to human and back again; the dead speak; an extended sequence takes place in a morgue, with erotic overtones that couldn’t underscore the book’s themes of life and death more overtly. It’s bemusing, at times baffling stuff, but the bleak, eerie mood is well sustained. MacSweeney, an expert at translating tricky Spanish-language writers like Valeria Luiselli and Elvira Navarro, cleanly captures Mendoza’s urge to pile narrative upon narrative and maintains a poker-faced tone even when the storytelling is at its most transgressive. However confusing, the novel sustains the idea that cruelty is humanity’s inheritance; “so much pain had been stored in his well that it was now almost full,” Juan recalls, and he’s not the only one.
A moody, spiky yarn of inherited loss and violence.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781644213711
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.
A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.
In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593489277
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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