Charming if a bit precious, Bárcena’s novel is both a love letter to the creative process and a contemplation on the...
Spain’s Bárcena has based his first novel on a true if bizarre literary hoax concocted in 1904: a romantic correspondence between rising young Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiménez (eventual recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize) and two Peruvian men pretending to be a young female fan.
Law students Carlos Rodriquez and José Gálvez decide to write Jiménez, the author of Violet Souls, to ask him to send them a copy of his latest book, which they cannot find in Lima’s bookstores. Both young men are wealthy aspiring poets. But Carlos, raised in a family of new money and no lineage, is self-conscious and self-effacing around casually self-important José, whose family can boast both money and a prestigious ancestry. As a kind of joke, which they share with their friends, the men decide to pretend to be a well-born young poetry lover named Georgina Hübner. Carlos, who has been teased for his feminine handwriting, does the actual writing of Georgina’s letters. Eventually Carlos comes up with the idea of turning the correspondence into a novel, and soon the novel takes over his life. The more he feels driven to write, the less ambition he has to be a great writer. José writes less, but his ambition for literary success grows. Thanks to advice from a professional love-letter writer, Georgina’s letters become more personal. After she shares a “tragedy” similar to one Jiménez has experienced, the poet is clearly smitten. In a different way, so is Carlos, who has modeled Georgina after his only experience approaching love, with a child prostitute he encountered when he was only 13. The correspondence stalls when Lima’s dockworkers go on strike, stopping trans-Atlantic mail delivery. The strike also causes a rift between Carlos, who has a new sociopolitical awareness, and José, who doesn’t. Nevertheless, the novel/correspondence continues until it reaches an unexpected crisis point.
Charming if a bit precious, Bárcena’s novel is both a love letter to the creative process and a contemplation on the sometimes-blurred line between life and art.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-63005-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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