After the treacly The Angel of Galilea (1998) and the acrid Leopard in the Sun (1999), you never know what you’ll get from...
A prominent Colombian family’s degradation and undoing mirror their country’s victimization by murderous drug lords in this ambitious novel, the author’s sixth in English translation.
Four narrators share the story of the Londoños of Bogotá, at least one of whom exhibits a deeply divided personality. She’s Agustina, a bewitchingly beautiful “lunatic” who drifts in and out of promiscuity and paranoia, and who, in memories of her childhood and youth (in which she often refers to herself in the third person), broods obsessively over her not-quite-sisterly affection for her frail, effeminate younger brother Bichi, the prime target of their domineering father’s violent physical abuse. Complementary and contrasting stories are told by Agustina’s doting husband, Aguilar, 16 years her senior, and a university professor unemployed due to ongoing political unrest (and reduced to delivering dog food); her former lover Midas McAllister, a drug-dealer in nervous thrall to internationally powerful overlord Pablo Escobar; and her German grandfather Nicholás Portulinus, a piano teacher whose cosmetic marriage to his former student Blanca masks his sexual attraction to nubile young musicians of both genders. Much of this is seductive and enthralling, and sharp characterizations (the best being the indirect one of the malevolent, unstable Escobar) keep the reader interested throughout. But the multiple narratives are presented without transitions and, too often, are so confusing that the reader is hard-pressed to decipher exactly who successively introduced characters are (a prime example: Agustina’s duplicitous and dangerous other brother Joaco), and how they’re all interconnected. Nonetheless, Restrepo’s unflinching portrayal of Agustina’s—and, by implication, Colombia’s—reluctance to confront her demons has genuine power, and many of this sometimes ungainly novel’s big scenes are hard to shake off.
After the treacly The Angel of Galilea (1998) and the acrid Leopard in the Sun (1999), you never know what you’ll get from Restrepo. Delirium is one of her better books.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-51990-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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