Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he’ll be swallowing his...
Fourth volume of the late (1943–90) Cuban writer’s semiautobiographical “pentagony” (Arenas’s word), written in 1991 as part of a five-volume sequence (The Palace of White Skunks, 1990, etc.).
The rambling, free-form fantasy begins—smashingly—with a 50-page verse play, “The Flight of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda.” The premise of this hilariously obscene set piece is the attempted escape to Miami of its eponymous heroine, a politically suspect poet, from the clutches of an island dictator named “Fifo”—who’s celebrating the 40th anniversary of his reign (declared the 50th, because that “round number” pleases the vainglorious tyrant). Fifo orders all his late political enemies recalled to life (for publicity purposes, but also for the pleasure of murdering them again)—and Arenas is off to the races: sketching the literary and (homo)sexual adventures of several locally famous “queens” and also his own several alter egos (Gabriel, “Skunk in a Funk,” et al); tossing off miscellaneous metafictional inventions (“Pensées,” “Tongue-Twisters,” interpolated satirical broadsides); reinventing traditional structure (the novel’s Foreword appears in its midsection)—all the while subjecting Fifo’s megalomaniacal posturing to elegant and devastating abuse. Examples: upon being informed that California apples can’t be grown on his island, Fifo declares this agricultural injustice is another illustration of capitalist aggression; a specially bred “Bloodthirsty Shark” patrols nearby waters, sniffing out would-be emigrants; a saint (Nelly) reputed to have been gay is marked for “decanonization”; the assassinations of rival heads of state are accomplished via anal intercourse, with that ultimate sexual weapon, “The Electric Venus”: on and on the scurrilous merriment goes. Yet beneath the grotesqueries, it’s plaintively clear that the story offers (as do all Arenas’s books, in some measure) “a detailed history of the horrors to which queer men of all stripes . . . [have] been subjected” through the ages, and especially in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he’ll be swallowing his cigars.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-84065-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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