Justice of sorts is done in this absorbing finale of a distinguished career.
For his last novel, the Argentinian writer (1934–2010) constructed a maze, at the heart of which is a woman who refuses to give her husband up for dead.
An Argentinian woman, dismissing eyewitness accounts of her husband’s execution by the military dictatorship, embarks on a 30-year search for him and is rewarded by his reappearance. Emilia Dupuy and Simón Cardoso, both cartography students, meet in Buenos Aires. They are instant soul mates, marrying in 1976, soon after the military coup. Emilia’s father is the publisher of a political magazine and the coup’s most able propagandist. The new president dines at the Dupuy mansion. Simón criticizes the use of torture. Dupuy is furious; his son-in-law must be punished. The young couple are sent to a remote town on a mapping assignment. Both are arrested. Emilia is released; Simón is never seen again. He has joined “the disappeared,” the regime’s notorious hallmark. Emilia sets off on a wild goose chase that takes her to Rio, Caracas and Mexico City, after having been viciously humiliated by Dupuy, a true monster, while caring for her senile mother; she eventually settles in a New Jersey town, working as a cartographer. Enter a new character, one of Emilia’s Jersey neighbors, a professor and novelist, evidently Martínez himself. In a postmodern twist, she is the protagonist in his novel in progress. The author’s interest in her life story somehow sparks Simón’s return, providing a happy ending for the reunited lovers. These events are embedded in a metaphysical density: mapping and disappearing are the novel’s two poles. The operatic quality of Argentinian life is given its full due, while the overreaching of the fascists receives a priceless putdown when Orson Welles meets Dupuy in Los Angeles. Ultimately, Martínez counteracts the black magic of the “disappearances” with his own novelist’s magic: the resurrection of one of the victims.
Justice of sorts is done in this absorbing finale of a distinguished career.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-711-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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