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THE CURRICULUM VITAE OF AURORA ORTIZ

Delightfully original, Solana’s fresh voice deserves attention.

A unique first novel about a young woman living in Madrid who approaches bureaucracy with an infectious, innocent charm.

Aurora Ortiz needs a job. Her intelligence is evident (she studied Latin and Greek and still reads classics) and her ambition is simple: She wants to be a building caretaker. But in order to apply for any kind of work, the 30-year-old widow has to register with an employment agency, draft a résumé and cover letter and set up lengthy in-person interviews, even though there might not be available openings. Aurora, who was raised in a tiny Galician village, has brought to Madrid an unconventional approach to everything, including job hunting. Rather than taking the traditional route, Aurora writes long, honest letters to the agency, and through them her life story emerges. She pontificates on her neighbor Fany, a trained beautician and award-winning writer who is excited about her new job as a supermarket cashier; she praises her Aunt Domi back in the village of San Clemente de Quintás; and she poignantly reminisces about her adoring late husband Roberto. Though Fany and her Madrid friends question Aurora’s technique, she thrives on the support of those back home (including new friend Clemente, who has taken a teaching post in the village). Eventually, her wacky persistence pays off when Guillermo, an officer in the employment agency, falls under the spell of her letters. Aurora is immensely likable, as quirky and enchanting as the title character of Amelie, and Solana’s satire of the ridiculous complexity of so much red tape will resonate with anyone who has had to look for work.

Delightfully original, Solana’s fresh voice deserves attention.

Pub Date: April 15, 2006

ISBN: 1-84343-096-7

Page Count: 150

Publisher: Harvill UK/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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THINGS FALL APART

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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