Polished if not precisely “light” comedy from an accomplished literary novelist who knows how to entertain.
Disorganized crime and lunatic melodrama share the spotlight in this prizewinning 1996 novel by the clever Spanish author (The Year of the Flood, 1996, etc.).
The story is set in Catalonia: specifically, Barcelona and the nearby resort town of Masnou, in the late 1940s, when Spain languishes under Franco’s postwar fascist regime. Popular playwright Carlos Prulla involves himself with rehearsals of his newest comedy (Arrividerci, Pollo!)—as well as with inept actress Lili Villalba, who’s also the plaything of the Prulla’s financial backer, crime boss Ignacio Vallsigorri. The latter turns up murdered, Prulla is suspected, then finds himself harassed by a down-to-earth police inspector and a hilariously righteous priest who urges Carlos to stop pleading innocence and accept punishment he deserves anyway, for writing such godless trash. And, in fact, Prulla’s play—rehearsals of which are interspersed with other actions—is a piece of largely plagiarized hackwork involving multiple murders, identity theft, and byzantine upstairs-downstairs intrigue. What Prulla doesn’t know is that Inspector Verdugones is keeping tabs on him because he’s acquainted with several pleasure-loving aristocrats involved in a royalist plot to depose Franco. Add to this a scheme to bring flour (a scarce postwar commodity) to Spain from South America by subverting a United Nations boycott, and you have more than enough for a carousel of a plot that moves at lightning speed and scatters bodies about imperturbably. Clueless Carlos is a splendidly amoral antihero; it’s impossible not to sympathize with his guilty bewilderment as the law’s noose appears to tighten, and the fallout from his dalliances with half a dozen fetching women (including his long-suffering wife Martita) threatens even direr consequences. It’s all enormous fun, though you may want to scribble notes and draw charts while endeavoring to comprehend its multiplying intricacies.
Polished if not precisely “light” comedy from an accomplished literary novelist who knows how to entertain.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-09-944898-X
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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