Ho-hum as either fiction or history.
First English edition of a 1969 novel by the renowned Mexican author (Tinisima, 1996): a fictionalized life of a soldadera who followed the Mexican Revolution’s soldiers on campaign that reads like a poorly edited oral biography.
The story is based on the experiences of Jesúsa Palancares de Aguilar, a cantankerous old woman in her 80s when Poniatowska, an experienced journalist, interviewed her. She presents Jesúsa’s lengthy narrative with almost no historical or social framework, apparently assuming readers’ intimate knowledge of the Revolution’s politics and warring factions. Even Poniatowska’s introduction to this edition provides little beyond her impassioned description of Jesúsa’s poverty in the 1960s, when the interviews were conducted. Perhaps something is lost in the translation, or maybe time has softened the urgency of Jesúsa’s plight. Certainly her experiences could be the raw material for a great historical novel: her mother dead, five-year-old Jesúsa is left with a shiftless, philandering father whose one act of kindness is making her a doll from a dead squirrel. She accompanies him when he goes off to fight with General Venustiano Carranza and is forced at age 14 to wed a 17-year-old soldier who beats her repeatedly. Jesúsa describes the day-to-day difficulties and atrocities of life during the Revolution but rarely comments on its political aspects. Captured by the Zapatistas, she's escorted home by Zapata himself, whom she describes as “a good-hearted man [not] interested in being president like all the rest.” Pancho Villa fares less well: “He didn’t fight like a man . . . that Villa was an ape.” Jesúsa’s travails and privations following the Revolution culminate in her espousal of a bizarre brand of spiritualism, the Obra Espiritual, that encompasses her belief in reincarnation. She claims she was an evil queen in an earlier existence and accepts this life’s miseries as her just punishment.
Ho-hum as either fiction or history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16819-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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