A sweeping, if flawed, historical novel.
The final novel from Cuban writer Benítez-Rojo (1931-2005) is a grand historical work about the kind of woman history often ignores.
As a medical student in 19th-century France, Henriette Faber disguised herself as a man. Eventually, she entered Napoleon’s army as a surgeon. Though she aspired to saving lives, she eventually became a criminal, guilty of perjury, "sexual deviance" (according to the mores of the time, anyway), and plenty more, banned from all other Spanish territories. Benítez-Rojo embodies this woman, a spiritual sister of Defoe’s Moll Flanders. What drove her from potential heroism into destitution? To answer this question, the novel moves from New York to Paris, from New Orleans to Cuba, spanning the globe and including situations of sweeping romance (this is the kind of story Ophüls or Visconti would’ve made a film of in the 1950s) but always remaining anchored to Henriette’s thoughtful first-person narration—sometimes too thoughtful. The prose here is dense and purposefully old-fashioned; it’s the kind of book where sentences begin, “It was said that….” This is a big novel and a slow-going one, measured in its pace even in its more emotional moments. For example, the first section follows Henriette’s marriage to Robert—a relationship that the movie posters would describe as “tumultuous” even though the reader rarely senses Henriette or the author getting worked up; this book is often distant by design. Nevertheless, Benítez-Rojo has a knack for simile—a street “looks like a long black cat," and an unwanted visitor is “like a mortar shell”—and rarely has a historical person been so fully inhabited since Yourcenar told the story of Hadrian. Eventually, the novel morphs into metatext: “I believe that all writing has a utilitarian purpose,” the narrator says, trying to write her story. And often, the matter of embodying another person’s consciousness is useful enough.
A sweeping, if flawed, historical novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87286-676-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
A frank look at the complexities of family, race and culture.
A Chinese family spanning the U.S. and the Netherlands grapples with the disappearance of one of their own.
Twenty-six-year-old Amy Lee is living in her parents’ cramped Queens apartment when she gets a frantic call from Lukas Tan, the Dutch second cousin she’s never met. Her successful older sister, Sylvie, who had flown to the Netherlands to see their ailing grandmother, is missing. Amy’s questions only mount as she looks into Sylvie’s disappearance. Why does Sylvie’s husband, Jim, look so bedraggled when Amy tracks him down, and why are all his belongings missing from the Brooklyn Heights apartment he and Sylvie share? Why is Sylvie no longer employed by her high-powered consulting firm? And when Amy finally musters up the courage to travel to the Netherlands for the first time, why do her relatives—the Tan family, including Lukas and his parents, Helena and Willem—act so strangely whenever Sylvie is brought up? Amy’s search is interlaced with chapters from Sylvie’s point of view from a month earlier as she returns to the Netherlands, where she had been sent as a baby by parents who couldn't afford to keep her, to be raised by the Tans. As Amy navigates fraught police visits and her own rising fears, she gradually uncovers the family’s deepest secrets, some of them decades old. Though the novel is rife with romantic entanglements and revelations that wouldn’t be amiss in a soap opera, its emotional core is the bond between the Lee sisters, one of mutual devotion and a tinge of envy. Their intertwined relationship is mirrored in the novel’s structure—their alternating chapters, separated in time and space, echo each other. Both ride the same bike through the Tans’ village, both encounter the same dashing cellist. Kwok (Mambo in Chinatown, 2014, etc.), who lives in the Netherlands, is eloquent on the clumsy, overt racism Chinese people face there: “Sometimes I think that because we Dutch believe we are so emancipated, we become blind to the faults in ourselves,” one of her characters says. But the book is a meditation not just on racism, but on (not) belonging: “When you were different,” Sylvie thinks, “who knew if it was because of a lack of social graces or the language barrier or your skin color?”
A frank look at the complexities of family, race and culture.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283430-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.
A modern Don Quixote lands in Trumpian America and finds plenty of windmills to tilt at.
Mix Rushdie’s last novel, The Golden House (2017), with his 1990 fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and you get something approaching this delightful confection. An aging salesman loses his job as a pharmaceutical rep, fired, with regret, by his cousin and employer. The old man, who bears the name Ismail Smile, Smile itself being an Americanization of Ismail, is “a brown man in America longing for a brown woman.” He is a dreamer—and not without ambition. Borrowing from both opera and dim memories of Cervantes, he decides to call himself Quichotte, though fake news, the din of television, and “the Age of Anything-Can-Happen” and not dusty medieval romances have made him a little dotty. His Dulcinea, Salma R, exists on the other side of the TV screen, so off Quichotte quests in a well-worn Chevy, having acquired as if by magic a patient son named Sancho, who observes that Dad does everything just like it’s done on the tube and in stories: “So if the old Cruze is our Pequod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, ‘Daddy,’ is my Ahab." By this point, Rushdie has complicated the yarn by attributing it to a hack writer, another Indian immigrant, named Sam DuChamp (read Sam the Sham), who has mixed into the Quixote story lashings of Moby-Dick, Ismail for Ishmael, and the Pinocchio of both Collodi and Disney (“You can call me Jiminy if you want,” says an Italian-speaking cricket to Sancho along the way), to say nothing of the America of Fentanyl, hypercapitalism, and pop culture and the yearning for fame. It’s a splendid mess that, in the end, becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization: “What vanishes when everything vanishes," Rushdie writes, achingly, “not only everything, but the memory of everything.”
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13298-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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