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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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