Forbes has the magic touch, and a glorious future.
In a captivating debut, Forbes presents the life of a temperamental Mexican-American beauty in a U.S. border town over a 65-year period.
Ayela Garzón drives the guys crazy. Not only is she beautiful and sexy, but she’s utterly indifferent to them, before and after the act. The 17-year-old lives with her dressmaker mother and her grandmother in the tiny town of Santa Rosalia, near the Rio Grande; the year is 1934. She is saved from her unnatural indifference two years later, when Frederick Linde passes through town. He’s a dashing 25-year-old Boston blueblood with a “law degree and an open heart,” on his way to do good, south of the border; but Ayela’s beauty stops him cold. They marry in secret before a public church wedding a year later, and will go on to have three children: Xavier, Freddie and Jesse. All this we learn piecemeal over the years from family, friends and neighbors. Forbes tells us just enough to whet our appetite for more. She also has novelist Anne Tyler’s uncanny eye for the convolutions of marriage and family. Here are husband and wife walking in the rain, their marriage hanging in the balance; they will make up once Ayela reveals her vulnerability. Here is the infinitely kind, energetic Frederick, in a middle-aged slump, tired of his bourgeois life; his shrewd mother-in-law sees his need for a time out, and he splits for a year, with Ayela’s blessing. Ayela herself is a woman of contradictions: imperious and humble, gentle and harsh. She will prove too much for her sons, who will flee to Boston. Years later, devastated by Frederick’s death, she will still have the love of her faithful Colombian maid, Concha. This new author depicts the tenuous comforts of old age as skillfully as the urgent desires of youth.
Forbes has the magic touch, and a glorious future.Pub Date: May 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-55970-807-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A roman-à-clef rejoinder to Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, splendidly evoking an India few outsiders know.
“The truth is, the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain”: an elegantly written, page-turning blockbuster by Australian newcomer Roberts.
The story is taken from Roberts’s own life: an Australian escapes from prison (he committed armed robbery to support heroin addiction) and flees to Mumbai (here, Bombay), where, hiding in the slums, he finds himself becoming at once increasingly Christlike and increasingly drawn into the criminal demimonde. The narrator, Lin, now going by Shantaram Kishan Kharre, takes to healing the sick while learning the ways of India’s poor through the good offices of a guide named Pribaker, who’s a little shady and more than a little noble, and through the booze-fogged lens provided by dodgy Eurotrash expats like aging French bad boy Didier, who “spoke a lavishly accented English . . . to provoke and criticize friend and stranger alike with an indolent malignity.” Measuring their lives in the coffeespoons of one monsoon season to the next, these characters work in the orbit of fabulous crimelords and their more actively malign lieutenants, all with murky connections to the drug trade, Bollywood, and foreign intelligence agencies (as one tells our narrator, “All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret”). Violence begets violence, the afflicted are calmed and balmed, friends are betrayed, people are killed, prison doors are slammed shut, then opened by well-greased palms. It’s an extraordinarily rich scene befitting Les Misérables, a possible influence here, or another less obvious but just as philosophically charged ancestor, James Michener’s The Drifters. Roberts is a sure storyteller, capable of passages of precise beauty, and if his tale sometimes threatens to sprawl out of bounds and collapse under its own bookish, poetic weight, he draws its elements together at just the right moment.
A roman-à-clef rejoinder to Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, splendidly evoking an India few outsiders know.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33052-9
Page Count: 960
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.
A fisherman confronts his life, loves, and mortality in this elliptical, somber novella.
The veteran Norwegian novelist Fosse (Aliss at the Fire, 2010, etc.) has a knack for compressing an entire lifetime into a few key moments in a few dozen pages. This book, echoing its title’s evocation of birth and death, opens with the birth of Johannes, an event described in run-on language that captures his father’s anxiety and mother’s exhaustion (“What a good strong boy Johannes yes and to stay in this stay here where nothing else Johannes will be a fisherman like his father”). The prose becomes less abstract in a longer second section that captures Johannes, who indeed became a fisherman, in his old age. But the mood is still unsettled in ways that suggest a ghost story: A widower, he steps out one morning contemplating his long life, seven children, and friendship with Peter, with whom he takes a portentous trip out into a nearby bay. Whether the instability has to do with Johannes' weakened state or something more metaphysical is a question Fosse leaves largely open to the reader; he weaves in mentions of superstitions and questions of God’s existence not so much to deliver direct comments on them but to suggest the ways our thinking flows uncertainly around them. Johannes’ recollections of a young girlfriend, [69] his late wife, [75] and caretaker daughter, Signe, are tender but unromantic—Fosse’s poetic prose implies that the things we love are just out of our grasps. (One paragraph is a riff on whether Signe actually sees him while approaching him.) [89] While Fosse’s writing is easy to admire—Johannes is beautifully depicted—it’s also easy to anticipate the grim place the story is moving toward.
A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-108-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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