A bracing set of stories about smaller traumas embedded among a country’s larger crises.
Dark pasts catch up with the protagonists of this collection from the veteran Colombian novelist.
The nine stories in Vásquez’s second collection generally turn on a past lie or misdeed that won’t be easily put to rest. In “The Double,” a man recalls all but condemning a schoolmate to military service that winds up killing him and that death’s long aftereffects on the young man’s family. The narrator of “Frogs” deserts from the army just before a scheduled deployment to the Korean War, a memory stirred by a chance meeting with a woman he helped through her own crisis at the time. In “The Last Corrido,” the lead singer of a musical troupe is in decline but fending off a young rival replacement, exemplifying the tension between the past and the future. Though these characters are flawed, often unethical, Vásquez withholds stern moral judgment; “Us,” for instance, mocks the urge to find simple, satisfying answers for a man’s disappearance. As ever, Vásquez is concerned with his home country’s history, but the shorter form gives his prose a welcome tightness; each story (via McLean’s translation) is crisp and conversational. Still, he can infuse historical breadth to the short form: The closing, title story concerns the unfortunate fate of Aurelia, a free-spirited woman and one-time newspaper columnist whose family was consumed by the country’s 1948 civil war. Throughout, Vásquez paints a picture of a country that’s constantly buffeted by violent political rivalries, narcos, and war and where even bystanders get drawn in. “They’re sending us far away to get killed so there won’t be so many of us they’ll have to kill here,” a soldier cracks in “Frogs,” and that note of fatalism runs through the whole book.
A bracing set of stories about smaller traumas embedded among a country’s larger crises.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19013-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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