An elegant meditation on the passage of time and its discontents.
Young Brazilian novelist and translator Galera (Blood-Drenched Beard, 2015) returns with a slender tale of yearning and memory.
The difference between men and boys, the old witticism has it, is the price of their toys. As our story opens, a 10-year-old boy goes tearing around his Brazilian city on a much-hacked bicycle, a self-designated “elite urban cyclist” who rockets across the landscape while avoiding cars and impediments such as “an unfinished cement wall whose surface looks as though bits of human skin and flesh would adhere to it nicely.” The decades pass, and now our boy—who has made good in life while avoiding trouble as assiduously as he did that wall—has been goaded into one great adventure, scaling an unclimbed Andean peak in the company of a childhood friend. The challenge steers him into a trip down Memory Lane, revisiting kids bearing names such as Walrus, Mononucleosis, and Chrome Black. Walrus, for one, now has a dignified name, a fat wallet, and an impossibly beautiful wife, but others haven’t made out so well—and one didn’t make it out of childhood at all, in a scarring episode that puts a dark edge on any pleasant nostalgia. Galera guides his story skillfully into and out of past and present, capturing the geeky pleasures of what is now ancient technology (“It’s a 386 DX. With thirty-three megahertz and four megabytes of RAM memory”) and the touching vulnerability of young people who think they’re immortal, as opposed to adults who are afraid of their own shadows. The storyline as such is a little thin, but Galera’s larger theme would seem to be how we reckon with the things we’ve done and seen, how we negotiate the roads not taken and deal with our mountains of regrets (our protagonist having just “walked out on an atmosphere of marital acrimony that could have been resolved quickly with a little compassion and a few well-chosen words”).
An elegant meditation on the passage of time and its discontents.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-548-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
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
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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