A tough-and-tender study of street life.
A clutch of stories exploring the perilous and complex inner lives of residents of Rio’s favelas.
This taut debut collection is mostly populated by young men who’ve been quickly hardened by the druggy, violent milieu of Brazil’s slums, where “sorry’s a feeling you get and lose quick,” as one narrator puts it. But most tend to be spectators, not participants, and none are so hardened that their characters lapse into gangland clichés. The drug-dealer-adjacent narrator of “Lil Spin” just wants to avoid being hassled by a cop for smoking a blunt on the beach; in “The Tag,” a veteran graffiti artist is trying to keep painting despite having a son at home and violence in the air; a recovering crack addict in “Padre Miguel Station” laments the drug’s impact on his old neighborhood, down to the pregnant junkie he spots on one grim visit; and the hero of “The Crossing” is a low-level thug ferrying a corpse to a landfill, though Martins wryly allows a sliver of guilt to slip inside him. (“He was so sure he was done for, he even started thinking about God.”) Martins’ prose (via Sanches’ translation) is fast-paced and slangy (“riding dirty’s a cinch, the parley’s slick”) while preserving the flavor of its Portuguese source; the word “perrengue,” slang for “problem,” stands untranslated for a kind of struggle remembered with a certain fondness (“We’ve been through plenty of perrengues together”; “one person’s perrengue can be another’s joy”). That word crystallizes the retrospective mood of these 13 stories, which are more sketches of remembered moments than full-bodied tales. At their best, though, Martins' sketches are remarkably powerful, as in “The Case of the Butterfly,” in which a boy watches a butterfly sink in a pan of frying oil and recognizes a symbol of his impending fate.
A tough-and-tender study of street life.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-22377-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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