An evocative collection that conveys the potency of desire in even the most ordinary lives.
In her first book to be published in English, Colombian author García Robayo plunks readers into nine seemingly mundane lives.
In the opening novella, Waiting for a Hurricane, a young woman aches to escape the world she has been born into: a coastal Colombian city where the lagoon, “because it was full of crap,” overflows when it rains and a “common as muck” family that refuses to face reality. Since the age of 7, the narrator has seen herself as different from the “lost causes” around her and so she makes bold personal and professional choices in order to forge her own path in the world. As the book moves into its second section, a collection of short stories published in Spanish as Worse Things, it continues to follow individuals eager to escape the frustrations of life. In "You Are Here," for instance, a salesman winds up in the “biggest hotel in Europe” after an accident at the Madrid airport results in all planes being grounded. All the man wants to do is wash up, have a smoke, and fly home to his wife, but the insistent hotel staff blocks even his small attempts to find comfort. In another story, "Worse Things," an adolescent named Titi finds ways to slowly withdraw into himself as his family monitors the space he takes up in the world. At first glance, the two novellas and seven short stories of this collection might appear to be quiet slices of everyday life. García Robayo’s thoughtful prose, however, which expertly combines playful wit with careful restraint, infuses each story with a powerful undercurrent of desire that can turn ordinary events like skipping school, chatting with neighbors, or stomaching an unexpected layover into surreal, often unnerving, encounters. While this emphasis on yearning appears most explicitly in the second novella, Sexual Education—an often humorous, refreshingly frank depiction of the expectations of chastity, pulls of desire, and atmosphere of confusion that encircle the lives of teenage girls—the unspoken longings and unanswered questions of the other tales similarly leave readers eager for more work from García Robayo.
An evocative collection that conveys the potency of desire in even the most ordinary lives.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9998593-0-5
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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