by Mario Vargas Llosa & translated by Alfred Mac Adam ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1985
Like Vargas Llosa's previous book, The War of the End of the World, this (far-more-readable) novel uses the illusions of revolution as its text and pretext: the subject is the reconstruction of the life and the impulses of a small-time Peruvian Trotskyite who got involved only once—but disastrously—in action. Written first as a series of interviews that a novelist-narrator is holding with those who knew the revolutionary manque Alejandro Mayta; and then by dint of artful pleating (you realize gradually that the contemplated work of fiction has begun without announcement, through a series of unmarked transitions), the book covers Mayta's tragic/comic life: his silly ideologies, abstruse and harmless; then his fateful meeting with a dubious Army lieutenant, Vallejos (who is perhaps a provocateur); Mayta's putative homosexuality; his decision to engage in an obviously doomed robbery of a small bank in a distant Andes backwater; the fiasco that ensues; capture and thereafter. Mayta, so marginal as to be nearly invisible, seems smaller the closer the novelist gets to him, a nice irony climaxed by anticlimax at the end: an interview with Mayta himself, now old, frail, no homosexual, resistant to even the tiniest myth about himself, dignity-less. It's the most resonant section of a book that seems more energetic than strictly necessary, something that might have made a good long story. Vargas Llosa's urge to explore his deterministic skepticism about the myths of revolution seems intellectually unimpeachable, especially in the Latin-American context he works from and in. But to North American readers, this book, like its predecessor, may seem not quite worth all the authorial effort.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1985
ISBN: 0374525552
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1985
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by Mario Vargas Llosa ; translated by John King
BOOK REVIEW
by Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo ; translated by Anna Kushner
BOOK REVIEW
by Mario Vargas Llosa ; translated by Adrian Nathan West
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Madeline Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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