Grandes’s serenely composed, ponderous work celebrates the healing power of friendship. It’s long-running, but ultimately...
A sinuous saga by Spanish novelist Grandes (The Ages of Lulu, 1994, etc.) pursues a tangle of apartment-house relationships in an Andalusian seaside town.
The arrival of the ill-fated Olmedo family from Madrid arouses the interest of residents in a new upper-middle-class housing development located on the outskirts of a popular tourist resort. Among them is 53-year-old Sara Gómez, the overprotected unmarried daughter of a captain in Franco’s army, also from Madrid. The new family, Sara learns from her cleaner, Maribel, consists of 40-ish orthopedic doctor Juan Olmedo, his retarded brother Alfonso and their ten-year-old niece Tamara, whose parents died in separate accidents within months of each other. Trying to make a new life for them in the pleasant town besieged by dangerous, changing east-west winds, Juan sends Tamara to school and secures daycare for Alfonso. Meanwhile, Maribel, divorced and lovelorn, with her own ten-year-old in tow, begins working for the doctor. Lonely Juan is still recovering from the death of his sister-in-law; he was passionately in love with Charo both before and after she married his brother Damián. Extensive flashbacks reveal each character’s secrets. Juan is fleeing potential prosecution for his brother's death: He was with Damián at the time of the accident, but claims he did not push his brother down the stairs in anger. Sara, who has just sold her godmother’s Madrid apartment for a monstrous sum, contemplates a reunion with the love of her life, father of her miscarried child. Fleshy, uneducated Maribel shakes off her hard-luck past (a no-good Lothario for a first husband) and, to the surprise of everyone, beds the needy doctor himself.
Grandes’s serenely composed, ponderous work celebrates the healing power of friendship. It’s long-running, but ultimately satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58322-746-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A first English translation of a 1989 Hungarian novel, in which the arrival of a traveling circus in a nondescript village arouses local curiosity, paranoia, and terror and ends in a kind of communal madness. Like the work of Austrian ur-pessimist Thomas Bernhard (which may have influenced it), Krasznahorkai’s darkly funny parable is presented in chapters of unbroken long paragraphs, and attains both a hurtling momentum and a pleasing complexity in the presentation of its passionately interconnected characters—the most memorable being the Valkyrie-like hausfrauen Mrs. Eszter and Mrs. Plauf, the former’s estranged husband (a music teacher who tries and fails to remain aloof from his neighbors’ fear of everything new and different), and the latter’s son Valuska, a young idealist whose “awakening” is gloomily foreordained. Not an easy read, but ingeniously composed and fascinating.
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-7043-8009-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
