A moving novel of an illicit and impassioned relationship.
Sledge (Mother and Son: A Memoir, 1995) turns his gaze southward to re-create the passionate love affair between Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian Lota de Macedo Soares.
Elizabeth and Lota had briefly met each other at a social function in New York, so when in 1951, at the age of 40, Elizabeth goes to Rio to visit some friends, it’s both likely and logical that she would renew her acquaintance with Lota, an immensely wealthy aristocrat and political firebrand. Besotted with modern architecture, Lota is building a glass house in Samambaia, in the jungle, where Elizabeth joins her—and Elizabeth essentially doesn’t go home for the next 17 years. The relationship is complicated, in part because of Lota’s fiery personality. She recognizes Elizabeth’s genius and encourages, coaxes and beguiles her into writing more poetry, but she’s both concerned and horrified by Elizabeth’s severe alcoholism. (At one point Elizabeth justifies her craving by claiming that “drinking…provided a context, a frame, if you required one, for the disorganized desire to cause injury to yourself, operating somewhat like the formal structure of a poem.”) For her part, Elizabeth wants to give herself over to the intensity of a love relationship, but Lota alternates between being clingy and erratic. The political situation in Brazil is volatile, though eventually Lota gets a place in the new order. As always, she’s both imperious and seductive—and she definitely likes to get her way—but the energy she invests in political commitments and maneuverings diminishes her relationship with the poet. After a short stint teaching at the University of Washington, Elizabeth returns to Brazil, feeling that she’s failed as a teacher. She comes back to discover Lota in ill health and begins to nurse her, though much to Lota’s rage she still can’t control her almost constant need for drink. Close to death, Lota hurries the process by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
A moving novel of an illicit and impassioned relationship.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-576-3
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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