Sophisticated wit and playful surrealist fantasy dominate these ingenious and gently mocking tales, by a Guatemalan-born soulmate to the late Jorge Luis Borges. This first English translation of Monterroso's work offers the contents of his two published collections, Complete Works and Other Stories (1959) and Perpetual Motion (1972): They're a monument, if that isn't the wrong word, to this entertaining author's trademark ``concision and wit.'' Several stories fill only a page, or even less: The memorable ``The Dinosaur'' requires but a single sentence, while ``The Eclipse'' says in a compact page-and-a-half all that need ever be said on the subject of cultural myopia. Elsewhere, Monterroso explores the political and social ramifications of a proper Bostonian's relocation to South America as a dealer in shrunken heads (``Mister Taylor''); toys with images of Margaret Truman as a nondescript pianist (``The Concert'') and Jacqueline Kennedy as a socially conscious culture-vulture (``First Lady''); and examines yet another form of North American exploitation of Latin America's resources (``The Brain Drain''). Monterroso's quirky interest in the integrity and depth of presumably unremarkable personas, objects, and animals (``Cow'') extends to a compulsive assemblage of epigraphs culled from poetry and prose descriptive of ``the fly.'' If several of the author's more discursive stories tend toward flat pronouncement, his essaylike studies of literary and cultural monomania achieve such happy consequences as an amazing and generous appreciation of his great peer and probable mentor (``The Advantages and Disadvantages of Jorge Luis Borges''); a dazzling portrayal—in ``Leopoldo (His Labors)''—of a semiliterate littÇrateur who, while preparing assiduously for a brilliant literary career, unfortunately neglects to write; and a deliriously funny catalogue-story (in the manner of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy), ``Solemnity and Eccentricity,'' that sketches the lives of such worthies as ``Charles Waterton . . . a naturalist, a first-rate taxidermist, and a highly skilled tree climber.'' Charming work, attractively translated by the estimable Edith Grossman, from a minor writer of something approaching genius.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-292-75183-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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