Though a study of slothfulness and its discontents, a welcome book on which the author has clearly expended energy.
A pleasingly quirky U.S. debut from Saldaña París, a young Mexican writer who now lives in Canada.
Rodrigo has the studied indifference of a Meursault, but he’s not really criminally inclined; sorting right from wrong would be too much work. He spends much of his time hanging out in his Mexico City apartment, which has, unusually, an empty lot next door on which, fittingly, nothing much happens. “My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another,” he says, in a “reign of inertia.” Rodrigo likes the unexamined and untroubled life, it seems, but things pick up, much to his chagrin, when he grudgingly takes a job and blunders his way into a marriage. Neither fits his lifestyle, which is doomed from the outset. “Living with Cecilia is self-inflicted torture,” he kvetches. “Her scorn for me grows with the weeks, festering like a tenacious parasite in the inches of mattress that separate us each night.” They wind up in his mother’s hometown, cousin to the ghostly plateau haunts of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, where an effusive Spaniard, a friend, perhaps more, of his mom’s, complicates his life with projects, even as Rodrigo wishes he could just be left alone to “sleep in late and walk in my underwear to the kitchen to drink—straight from the bottle—a swig of thick, repulsive milk.” The plot itself thickens, though not repulsively, as those projects widen to take in psychedelic cacti, astral projection, hypnosis, cultic doings, and expatriate hipsterdom: Rodrigo can barely keep up, and in the end, the simplicity of that empty lot beckons. The story is both critique and sendup of millennial slackerdom, and though it’s more character study than action-driven, what does happen is full of odd twists and surprises. Among the high points are Saldaña París’ exasperated but affectionate paeans to “the immense, beautiful city” that is Mexico’s capital.
Though a study of slothfulness and its discontents, a welcome book on which the author has clearly expended energy.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56689-430-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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