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MAQROLL

Name: MAQROLL
Author: Alvaro Mutis
ISBN: 0-06-016623-1

THREE NOVELLAS

by Alvaro Mutis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 1992

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Elegant, overworldly (in that relentless manner a certain strain of Latin American who, me, provincial? writing has: ``Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrine Venice or chimerical Istanbul, not on the Ile-de-France or in Tours or Stratford-on-Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers''), and hyperliterary (one section begins with quotations in Italian, French, and Spanish, including one from a poem by the author himself), Colombian writer Mutis's three novellas here have as their main character a shadowy adventurer alternately called Maqroll or ``the Gaviero'' (the Lookout). An authorial alter-ego, Maqroll is imagination personified as he recalls quixotic jungle journeys, or finds himself in various stages of picturesque entrepreneurship (such as running a brothel in Panama City with the piquant twist of specializing in young women who all pass themselves off as stewardesses), or is nearly executed after being mistaken for a guerrilla leader. Mutis (superbly translated into elegant English by the redoubtable Edith Grossman) is, on the strength of this introductory book, an acquired taste. Except for the bookishness and erotic connoisseurship that the Gaviero effortlessly gives off, the storytelling is stagy and close to precious, quite taken with its own jeweled surfaces and sheens. Intriguing, then, though the drumming artifice keeps you distant.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1992

ISBN: 0-06-016623-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BOYS OF ALABAMA

A NOVEL

by Genevieve Hudson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2020

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

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A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.

Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

Pub Date: May 19, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

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FAMILY TREE

by Susan Wiggs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.

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After a year in a coma, Annie Rush wakes up to a world without her husband, the TV she developed, and a wealth of memories that put her life into context, but as her body and mind heal, she puts her faith in second chances.

As a successful cooking-show producer who’s married to the gorgeous star, Annie knows she’s lucky, so she overlooks the occasional arguments and her husband’s penchant for eclipsing her. She’s especially excited the day she finds out she’s pregnant and, ignoring her typical steadfast schedule, rushes to the set to tell him. And discovers him making love to his onscreen assistant. Stunned, Annie leaves, trying to figure out her next move, and is struck on the head by falling on-set machinery. She wakes a year later in her Vermont hometown, as weak as a kitten and suffering from amnesia. As the days pass, however, she finds clues and markers regarding her life, and many of her memories begin to fill in. She remembers Fletcher, the first boy she loved, and how their timing was always off. She wanted to leave her family’s maple farm behind and explore the world—especially once her cooking-themed film school project was discovered and she was enfolded into the LA world of a successful food show. Fletcher intended to follow her, until life created big roadblocks for their relationship that they could never manage to overcome. Now, however, Annie’s husband has divorced her while Fletcher has settled in Switchback, and just as things look like they may finally click for Fletcher and Annie, her pre-accident life comes calling again. Wiggs (Starlight on Willow Lake, 2015, etc.) examines one woman’s journey into losing everything and then winning it all back through rediscovering her passions and being true to herself, tackling a complicated dual storyline with her typical blend of authenticity and sensitivity.

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.