Do§a InÇs Vs. Oblivion ($27.50; Oct. 26; 243 pp.; 0-8071-2476-1) An accomplished 1992 novel, which won the 1998 Pegasus Prize, surveys Venezuela’s modern history through the combative lament of —a crazy old aristocratic woman, . . . lost in her memoirs, . . . shouting for her slave women and her children, who—d already forgotten her.— The eponymous Do§a InÇs’s heated monologue excoriates such real watershed events as Sim¢n Bol°var’s revolution and R¢mulo Betancourt’s attempts to establish democracy, while she simultaneously vilifies the freed former servant who sues for ownership of her land (the story features a Dickensian court case that drags on for generations) and her late husband Alejandro, whose death has left her alone to confront the tide of revolution and social change. What distinguishes Torres’s energetic tragicomedy from dozens of other magical-realist Latin American novels is its focus on the embattled relationships among classes and between masters and servants. Do§a InÇs is both a retrograde tyrant and ferocious force of nature, and Torres has brought her to life (-in-death) with stunning success.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-8071-2476-1
Page Count: 243
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.
One of Germany's most celebrated young novelists updates and transforms the 16th-century classic Till Eulenspiegel.
The story is now set during the Thirty Years' War, 300 years after the time of the original story. And the boy protagonist's name is now spelled Tyll Ulenspiegel. After his Lutheran father, Claus, a miller, is hanged by the fanatical Jesuit inquisitor Oswald Tesimond for possessing books on black magic, Tyll escapes his village with his sister, Nele. A precocious kid with an obsession for tightrope walking, he becomes a prankish entertainer and provocateur who can transfix crowds with his act and create chaos. Told through multiple points of view, the novel mixes such historical figures as Elizabeth, exiled Winter Queen of Bohemia, with folkloric characters including a talking donkey named Origenes. Parts of the book could hardly be more relevant to the present, including this circular exchange on torture: "Without torture no one would ever confess anything!" "Whereas under torture everyone confesses." In exploring the borders between history and myth, Kehlmann (You Should Have Left, 2017, etc.) sometimes risks putting off readers with his intellectual gamesmanship. More often, he creates odd, darkly entertaining scenes. The miller is at the center of several of them. He is executed for possessing a book of spells that he can't read because it's in Latin. And no one has ever faced the gallows as sated as Claus, who pushes an all-you-can-eat last-meal policy to the max.
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4746-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
A fresh take on the WWII love story, with a narrator who practically demands Myrna Loy come back to life to play her in the...
To a portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, this historical novel adds two grand fictional passions: one beginning in Switzerland in 1900, the other in the Bahamas in 1941, both involving a ginger-haired Brit named Thorpe.
The first scene of Williams' (The Summer Wives, 2018, etc.) latest novel introduces the resourceful and wonderfully articulate Lulu Randolph Thorpe, "a pedigree twenty-five-year-old feline, blessed with sleek, dark pelt and composure in spades." A columnist for an American women's magazine stationed in the Bahamas in the early 1940s, Lulu reports on the doings of the former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson—scrupulously avoiding all mention of the thicket of political corruption and racial tension that surrounds them. But to us, Lulu tells all, going back to how she dispensed with her first husband, the problematic Mr. Randolph, and continuing through her current mission—to spring her second husband, British undercover agent Benedict Thorpe, from a German prison camp. A second narrative set 40 years earlier focuses on Elfriede von Kleist, a new mother from rural Westphalia with postpartum depression so severe she has attempted suicide, causing her husband, the Baron, to dispatch her to a clinic in Switzerland. There she meets a young Londoner named Wilfred Thorpe, interrupting his grand tour of the continent to recover from pneumonia—but never to recover from meeting Elfriede. The portrait of wartime Bermuda and the awful Windsors, observed and reported by Lulu, is original and fascinating. Lulu herself is an excellent creation, tough, smart, sexy, and ruthless. While the secondary Elfriede plot adds interesting complications to the historical puzzle, it doesn't have quite as much verve.
A fresh take on the WWII love story, with a narrator who practically demands Myrna Loy come back to life to play her in the movie.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283475-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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