A lush fantasy in which a man must unwind time itself to right the world’s wrongs.
A Mexican Vietnam vet searches for redemption through magic after he discovers an ancient time machine.
Defense attorney and novelist Véa (Gods Go Begging, 1999, etc.) dives into magical realism headfirst in this hallucinatory fantasy that reads like a blend of John Steinbeck and Robert A. Heinlein. The book opens on a California vineyard circa 1961 as an orphaned boy named Simon Vegas arrives seeking work. A few days later, a female skydiver plummets to the earth, dying right in front of the boy. Then the novel opens on the present day as Simon’s pregnant wife, Elena, wonders what dark secrets her husband is keeping from her with his project in their garage. Finally, the book spins out the long history of a talisman called “the Antikythera mechanism,” a powerful machine built by the Greek physicist Archimedes that grants the user the ability to travel through time. The device was being used by the U.S. Army in Vietnam when a lowly draftee purloined it—a man who turns out to be Simon. Eventually he enlists his oddball amigo Hephaestus Segundo to help repair the strange machine. From here, Véa contrasts Simon’s pedestrian life—volunteering to teach poetry at a prison, debating with his friend Ezekial Stein, and preparing for fatherhood—with his superheroic adventures using the time machine to intervene in situations where people have been wronged. He saves a boy in Texas from a lynching, rescues Joan of Arc from her pyre, and plots to send the doomed prisoners of Bergen-Belsen to a magical residency in what Simon calls “a section of my Mexican heaven called Boca Raton.” “I think they just live out their lives—the lives they would have had if people had left them alone,” Simon explains. It’s a dizzying novel that combines Véa’s solid prose style with a vivid imagination and an authentic cultural brio.
A lush fantasy in which a man must unwind time itself to right the world’s wrongs.Pub Date: June 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8703-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.
The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-92721-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
A moody exploration of bleak wartime Britain.
Healey looks back fondly at the tradition of spooky English country-house fiction while adding a few twists of her own.
With more than a few nods to Jane Eyre and Rebecca, this debut novel throws an awkward but stalwart heroine into a decaying house with history and mystery to spare. Friendless Hetty Cartright has found a home working among the stuffed specimens at a major natural history museum in London. When, in 1939, the museum decides to farm out its collection to houses in the countryside in order to avoid their destruction in the anticipated bombing of the city, Hetty is assigned to guard the stuffed mammals in their temporary home at Lockwood Manor. The decaying manor, ruled by the imperious and lascivious Lord Lockwood, has “four floors, six flights of stairs, and ninety-two rooms,” some with resident ghosts, and Hetty soon has her hands full attempting to protect the animals, some of which disappear and many of which she finds in disconcerting new spots. Scorned by the household staff, Hetty finds an ally in Lord Lockwood's sensitive, unstable daughter, Lucy, who narrates the portions of the novel that Hetty doesn't. As the two become closer and face their individual fears and insecurities, the peril of the house amps up, culminating in a disastrous party. While Healey sometimes lays on the atmospheric menace with a heavy hand, especially considering how light on action the novel actually is, and though she ties up her plot threads in a few hasty pages, her depictions of the historical period and of the dread of anticipating full-scale war are vivid. The animals, frozen in place and unable to defend themselves either against the encroaching Germans or the more immediate dangers of the live animals and insects that want to devour them, mirror the plight of the women caught in Lockwood Manor.
A moody exploration of bleak wartime Britain.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-10640-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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