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I DIDN'T TALK

Name: I DIDN'T TALK
Author: Beatriz Bracher
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2736-0

by Beatriz Bracher ; translated by Adam Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 2018

A slender but memorable contribution to the literature of crime and (sometimes self-inflicted) punishment.

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Pensive novel of political terror and its consequences, set in the shadow of post-junta Brazil.

Born in 1961, just in time to experience the military dictatorship for herself, Bracher turns out a somber slice-of-life narrative centering on a professor who, after a long career in education, is preparing to leave the academy, sell his house, and move to the countryside. Gustavo knows that when he leaves his home, “a developer will tear it down, like all the other old homes nearby.” It doesn’t matter, for he lives in his mind, and there he faces incapacitating guilt over the death of his late wife’s brother, arrested with him as student activists in 1970. “Look, I was tortured,” he protests, “and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets.” Protest as he might that he didn’t do it, that he didn’t talk, Gustavo worries endlessly at his responsibility for Armando’s death—and the death of his grieving wife afterward, “without ever finding out that I’d said what I never said.” Scarred by his experiences in prison, Gustavo has scarcely dared profess a political view since; in fact, he confesses, he is retiring from his job “out of cowardice,” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a revolt against changes in the very pension system that will provide his keep even as he is cheated out of part of it. He protests further: “I was never a revolutionary, never participated in the enthusiasm.” He protests, in the end, too much, and the reader is left to mistrust a narrator who has rationalized for half a century that his comrade and friend, though not deserving death, brought his fate on himself. Bracher’s story turns in on itself, revisiting those long-ago moments from the point of view of an old, tired man consumed by the deeds and misdeeds of youth.

A slender but memorable contribution to the literature of crime and (sometimes self-inflicted) punishment.

Pub Date: July 31, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2736-0

Page Count: 160

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ANTONIO
by Beatriz Bracher ; translated by Adam Morris

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.