Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly.
From Italy’s prize-winning Baricco (City, 2002; Ocean Sea, 1999, etc.), a thinny-thin little tale that stretches credibility but takes up big imponderables.
After a war that’s unnamed but sounds like WWII, three men come to a remote farmhouse somewhere in Italy to slay another man: Manuel Roca, an erstwhile medical doctor from the losing side in the war, whose hospital, according to those now coming to kill him, was a Dr. Mengele–like place of torture and despair such that patients asked only for death (which one of the three men now present indeed gave to his own agonized brother when he found him in that hospital). The atrocities of Manuel Roca are hearsay to the reader, though the atrocities visited upon him are not, as he is first tortured and then killed, as his preteen son is machine-gunned into bits—and as his young daughter listens to all from a root cellar under the floor. The boy-monster, Tito, who does the machine-gunning, is also the one who opens the cellar and sees the girl lying down below—and spares her, if only because the other two killers don’t hear him shout that she’s there. So much for the book’s first half. In the second, an aging woman—the girl of the cellar—walks in a city, comes upon a man selling lottery tickets from inside a booth, begs him to close up shop and come with her to a café—where she reveals that she’s the girl he spared and that she knows he’s the killer Tito who, albeit by accident, let her live. The two talk, weep, reconstruct the events between then and now, events that include the apparent fact of the woman’s having tracked down the other two of the three killers and killed them in revenge. And so what does she have in mind, now, for the lost, aged, and haunted-by-the-past Tito?
Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4145-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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