Sometimes inelegant but deeply observed; a welcome arrival by a writer worth paying attention to.
A melancholy coming-of-age story, the American debut of Mexican writer Herbert.
Narrated in the first person, Herbert’s novel tells the story of a no-longer-quite-young man who attends to his mother as she lies dying of leukemia. “It’s her fault you’re white trash,” he reflects, quickly correcting himself: “but you’re not white, you’re a barefoot Indian a darkskin with a foreign name a biological joke a dirty mestizo and yes, yes: a piece of trash.” Mamá has her faults, to be sure: she had spent her working years as a working girl using various pseudonyms, and the narrator’s siblings are all the products of different fathers (“My elder sister, Adriana, is the bastard daughter of Isaac Valverde, an exceptional businessman and pimp”) who figured in her life in one way or another. Once passionate in his hatred for her, the narrator now inclines to a little more pity for the shriveled, exhausted figure on the hospital bed, “bald, silent, yellow, breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event.” The narrator’s tale jumps back and forth in time, recounting episodes in his life with Mamá, who once kicked him hard so that he would have a bruise to show off to the cops when complaining about an assault by a neighborhood kid. If anything, it reveals that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the encino; Mamá may not be a model of virtue, but her kid is fond of smoking crack, even in the bathroom of her hospital room, and of rough and unloving sex. Along the way, Herbert ventures pointed critiques at Mexican society, as when he notes that because of an error, Mamá had to have two death certificates: “What better homage could Mexican bureaucracy pay to a fugitive from her own name?”
Sometimes inelegant but deeply observed; a welcome arrival by a writer worth paying attention to.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-799-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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