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DAIMON

Name: DAIMON
Author: Abel Posse
ISBN: 0-689-12123-7

by Abel Posse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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Another dazzling postmodern evocation of a conquistador and a continent from Argentinian writer Posse (The Dogs of Paradise, 1990). Posse's subject for fictional revisionism is the notorious Lope de Aguirre, a lieutenant of Pizarro's who betrayed his commander and established his own ill-fated empire in the upper reaches of the Amazon. Aguirre (subject of the 1973 Werner Herzog movie The Wrath of God) is one of those larger-than-life villains who are so richly susceptible to postmodern irony, as well as the now-obligatory fugues into magic realism. Posse's Aguirre, who has made a pact with the devil, is cruel, greedy, and congenitally restless. As he leads his followers, both the dead and the living, through the jungle in search of riches, he tortures his men, slaughters local tribes, and with his men abuses the hospitality of the legendary Amazons and their queen. They struggle on to Cartagena, to a new world with different rules and ways of doing business. Distressed by the changes, Aguirre heads back into the jungle, finds Eldorado, which also disappoints, and only a brief period of domesticity at Machu Picchu with the longed-for Girl-Nun offers a temporary respite. Aguirre and his companions continue to appear in various incarnations over the centuries; he survives torture in Argentina, then finally dies while choking on a chicken bone, but his daimon is too fierce and infectious to be extinguished—plunder and treachery will continue. Aguirre has his good side, though, and, like Faust, becomes by the end an object of pity, an ambitious Westerner consumed by ``a strange power that seems exclusively destructive,'' unlike the Indians, who are ``content to simply commune with the things of the world.'' Posse's second—a splendid match of insight and imagery, with a bawdy, iconoclastic, and always engrossing narrative—is another memorable portrait of a particular person and place, as well as a familiar human trait.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-689-12123-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE SNOW CHILD

by Eowyn Ivey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2012

A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.

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A couple struggling to settle in the Alaskan wilderness is heartened by the arrival of the child of their dreams—or are they literally dreaming her?

Jack and Mabel, the protagonists of Ivey’s assured debut, are a couple in their early 50s who take advantage of cheap land to build a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s. But the work is backbreaking, the winters are brutally cold and their isolation only reminds them of their childlessness. There’s a glimmer of sunshine, however, in the presence of a mysterious girl who lurks near their cabin. Though she’s initially skittish, in time she becomes a fixture in the couple's lives. Ivey takes her time in clarifying whether or not the girl, Faina, is real or not, and there are good reasons to believe she’s a figment of Jack and Mabel’s imaginations: She’s a conveniently helpful good-luck charm for them in their search for food, none of their neighbors seem to have seen the girl and she can’t help but remind Mabel of fairy tales she heard in her youth about a snow child. The mystery of Faina’s provenance, along with the way she brightens the couple’s lives, gives the novel’s early chapters a slightly magical-realist cast. Yet as Faina’s identity grows clearer, the narrative also becomes a more earthbound portrait of the Alaskan wilderness and a study of the hard work involved in building a family. Ivey’s style is spare and straightforward, in keeping with the novel’s setting, and she offers enough granular detail about hunting and farming to avoid familiar pieties about the Last Frontier. The book’s tone throughout has a lovely push and pull—Alaska’s punishing landscape and rough-hewn residents pitted against Faina’s charmed appearances—and the ending is both surprising and earned.

A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-316-17567-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BLACK WOODS, BLUE SKY
by Eowyn Ivey

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE BRIGHT EDGE OF THE WORLD
by Eowyn Ivey

- PROFILES
Alaska, Beautiful and Rugged, in ‘The Snow Child’

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.