Pérez-Reverte ends the novel imaginatively, but not soon enough to rescue it from portentousness and redundancy. The author...
Dialectic replaces drama in a different kind of historical suspense novel, an international bestseller published in the U.S. for the first time, from the Spanish author (The Queen of the South, 2004, etc.).
The protagonist, Andrés Faulques, is a celebrated war photographer who, in middle age, has retreated to a watchtower on the Spanish Mediterranean coast to work on a huge circular mural depicting every war ever fought. Channeling the great masters of battle painting (such as Goya, Bruegel and Picasso), Faulques settles into a daily routine that includes swimming in the sea, listening to a female tour guide (who includes him among the region’s attractions) and fighting off pain from the incurable illness (doubtless cancer) that is killing him. Then one day a visitor arrives: a Croatian named Ivo Markovic. Markovic is a former soldier whose image happened to be captured in one of the photographs that made Faulques rich and famous. Markovic reveals that the photograph, widely shown during wartime, was employed by Croatia’s Serbian enemies, soldiers who hunted down Markovic’s family, raped and tortured his wife and murdered her and their young son. The occluded morality of art and the artist thus becomes the subject of daily conversations between the two men, after the Croatian has informed the photographer that he has come to kill him. Despite the beauty of Peden’s lucid translation and the tension implicit in contrasts between Markovic’s emotion and Faulques’s stoical fatalism, the novel becomes static—clogged with colloquies about the “Butterfly Effect” (it states that a small action innocently performed can resonate dangerously around the world) and the exploitative element in fashioning beautiful images from human suffering (most piercingly in Faulques’s hesitantly shared recollection of Olvido, his former female colleague and lover—and the subject of his camera’s insistent eye).
Pérez-Reverte ends the novel imaginatively, but not soon enough to rescue it from portentousness and redundancy. The author has done and can do better than this.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6598-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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