Histrionics aside, an insider account with real teeth.
Pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba as seen through the eyes of a young refugee.
Like her protagonist, Nora, debut novelist Samartin left Cuba with her family after Castro’s revolution and settled in Los Angeles. In occasionally overwrought language, she spins a gripping tale. Nora’s extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are first seen in their idyllic haute bourgeoisie milieu: chaperoned dances, sumptuous dinners, cocktails on sun-swept terraces, swims in limpid, azure waters. As revolution looms, Nora and her cousin, beautiful Alicia, are mostly preoccupied with boys, especially Tony, the gorgeous biracial nephew of Great Aunt Panchita’s maid, Lola. When Castro’s advent destroys their comfortable existence, the Garcia clan flees Cuba as soon as they can bribe their way out, leaving Tía Panchita and Alicia behind—she has married Tony, a staunch Communist, over family objections. In the book’s balky midsection, the emphasis shifts from turmoil in Cuba to Nora’s more conventional problems—adjustment to America, teenage angst and a growing attachment to an older teacher, Jeremy. Letters from Alicia filter through, recounting ever-escalating crises: After a utopian start on a sugar-cane collective, there’s the birth of Lucinda, who is blind; Tony is called to serve in the Angolan war; Lucinda’s hope for a cure is blighted by red tape; and Tony is imprisoned. As Nora’s life improves—she’s in graduate school and married to Jeremy—Alicia’s spins apart. She must trade sexual favors with a prison guard to ensure Tony’s safety. Later, she turns to prostitution at one of the glitzy hotels the government sponsors to distract tourists from Havana’s decay. Returning, Nora finds matters far worse than Alicia’s letters intimated: Alicia has HIV. Unless Nora contrives a rescue, Alicia will be taken to a colony where AIDS sufferers are warehoused until death, and Lucinda will go to a state orphanage. The shocking revelations that pile up at the close threaten to swamp the story, like the sharks that will eventually circle Nora’s escape boat.
Histrionics aside, an insider account with real teeth.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8779-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.
Plenty of gore from days of yore fills the 12th entry in Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom series (War of the Wolf, 2018, etc.).
The pagan warlord Uhtred of Bebbanburg narrates his 10th-century adventures, during which he hacks people apart so that kingdoms might be stitched together. He is known to some as the Godless or the Wicked, a reputation he enjoys. Edward, King of Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia is gravely ill, and Uhtred pledges an oath to likely heir Æthelstan to kill two rivals, Æthelhelm and “his rotten nephew,” Ælfweard, when the king dies. Uhtred’s wife, Eadith, wants him to break that oath, but he cannot live with the dishonor of being an oathbreaker. The tale seems to begin in the middle, as though the reader had just turned the last page in the 11th book—and yet it stands alone quite well. Uhtred travels the coast and the river Temes in the good ship Spearhafoc, powered by 40 rowers struggling against tides and currents. He and his men fight furious battles, and he lustily impales foes with his favorite sword, Serpent-Breath. “I don’t kill the helpless,” though, which is one of his few limits. So, early in the story, when a man calling himself “God’s chosen one” declares “We were sent to kill you,” readers may chuckle and say yeah, right. But Uhtred faces true challenges such as Waormund, “lord Æthelhelm’s beast.” Immense bloodletting aside, Cornwell paints vivid images of the filth in the Temes and in cities like Lundene. This is mainly manly fare, of course. Few women are active characters. The queen needs rescuing, and “when queens call for help, warriors go to war.” The action is believable if often gruesome and loathsome, and it never lets up for long.
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256321-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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