Head-on against the grim indignities of an unequal world, Falero’s poetic novel embraces humor and empathy.
A look at poverty and ambition in Brazil.
The title characters begin this vibrant and punchy novel (Falero’s first to be translated into English) as stock workers at a Porto Alegre supermarket. The ball gets rolling when Pedro—the bookish smooth talker of the pair—takes “stock of the world around him” and realizes that all his problems have one solution: money. Meanwhile, Marques—more demure and gruff— is repeatedly “zapped” by “the stinger of self-hatred” as he imagines the meager life in store for his children. He, too, resolves to escape poverty. In a long-winded and entertaining dialogue, Pedro primes Marques on socialism (“The guy was called Marques, like me?” “No. Marx, with the letter ex”), convincing him they deserve a little comfort and luxury—even if comfort and luxury mean breaking a few bourgeois laws. Everyone has “to choose between being a thug or a slave,” Pedro says more than once. But once they hatch a scheme to finally move up in the world, the two friends spend the duration toeing that line, eager to attain power and dignity without betraying their values. Falero tells this story in delightful prose. Meandering sentences and wry repetitions breathe personality into the characters’ inner lives, and the landscape of Porto Alegre’s slums is rendered with forlorn affection. Occasional metaphors sing: Pedro is at one point “so tired he felt soft like butter”; we see one character’s “sorrow brim over and touch” another. Through Falero’s lovable characters, readers will meditate on violence and respectability within the death-trap of runaway capitalism. “When reality walks through the door,” he warns, “there isn’t a single smile that doesn’t fly out the window.
Head-on against the grim indignities of an unequal world, Falero’s poetic novel embraces humor and empathy.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781662601231
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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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