A cheerless but supremely well-crafted story that proves Franco to be among the best Latin American writers at work today.
A prodigal son returns to a spectral Colombia in a novel by a writer praised by Gabriel García Márquez.
“My father’s [death] obeys a natural law in Colombia—the law of the jungle.” So says Larry, returning to Medellín after a dozen years away, his father having been kidnapped and killed in the endless cartel wars. His father, Libardo, was a man accustomed to luxury, for, as Franco’s (Paradise Travel, 2006, etc.) novel unfolds, with the time and point of view constantly shifting, we learn of his powerful place within the crime syndicate ruled by Pablo Escobar. His boss gunned down, anguish eats at Libardo as he realizes that he’s now a target himself. He disappears, leaving his wife, “the former Miss Medellín 1973,” to drink, shop, and slowly disintegrate. In a scenario reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, Larry and his friends drink, smoke pot, snort coke, and look for something to do, trading barbs that the translator renders in perfect young Americanese, “dudes” and “bullshit” and all. Those friends bear names like La Murciélaga (Batwoman, that is), Carlos Chiquito (Teeny Tiny Charles), and Pedro the Dictator. Collectively they slide, free fall, into addiction and the betrayals large and small that, Franco suggests, are inevitable in a society consumed by violence: “I’d often pass by the site of a recent explosion and shudder at the wreckage, the dried blood,” Larry recalls of Escobar’s car-bomb campaign. “Anything might be a piece of leg, an arm; a pile of something would look like a pile of guts, and there was always a lone shoe somewhere, loose sneakers, flip-flops, boots amid the rubble.” A dark moment comes when it slowly dawns on Larry that his mother and his best friend are up to no good, and vengeance follows with a flicker of magical realism courtesy of an appearance by Libardo’s ghost. For the most part the story is grimly realistic, however, even as it ends with a welcome suggestion of redemption
A cheerless but supremely well-crafted story that proves Franco to be among the best Latin American writers at work today.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-589-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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