A welcome, disturbing reminder of the power of magical realism to distort and reveal by turns.
A newly revised translation of Chilean novelist Donoso’s daring, deeply surreal exploration of self, isolation, and Latin American mysticism, including 20 pages of text that was cut from an earlier edition.
A squiggly but unbroken line runs from Kafka’s Metamorphosis through Camus’ The Stranger to this 1970s cult classic and beyond to modern relations like Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night (2023) and Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio (2023). Set in a haunted nunnery overstuffed with grotesqueries, decaying memories, and nightmares both real and imagined, this labyrinthine novel is confounding to understand even as its disturbing imagery and universal dread linger. Combined with a narrator who is so unreliable that his very identity is an enigma, the fragmented narrative heightens the sense of dread and disorientation. In a decidedly nonlinear fashion, we eventually ferret out that the narrator is Humberto Peñaloza, a writer of little means who’s in over his head. He’s been hired by Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía, a wealthy and influential aristocrat being groomed for political office, to write about his family legacy. By the time the story begins, the future senator is obsessed with producing an heir, which his wife, Inés, cannot. Meanwhile, the narrator has somehow become “Mudito”—a supposedly deaf-mute giant banished to one of the Don Jerónimo family’s dilapidated estates, which is now housing 40 outcast women, five orphans, and three nuns. The whole domestic scene doesn’t get any less weird when one deformed child is introduced and the narrator is ordered to hire a menagerie of “first-class monsters,” educators with similar deformities, to look after the offspring, called only “Boy.” With shades of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Don Jerónimo tries alternately to hide and cure his progeny while Humberto/Mudito becomes deeply entwined in the child’s life. Having either fully captured or utterly dismayed his audience by now, Donoso lets his story disintegrate into a surreal mélange of madness, cryptic rituals, and the proverbial abyss staring back. Your mileage may vary.
A welcome, disturbing reminder of the power of magical realism to distort and reveal by turns.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780811232227
Page Count: 464
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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