by Daniel Saldaña París ; translated by Christina MacSweeney ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016
Though a study of slothfulness and its discontents, a welcome book on which the author has clearly expended energy.
A pleasingly quirky U.S. debut from Saldaña París, a young Mexican writer who now lives in Canada.
Rodrigo has the studied indifference of a Meursault, but he’s not really criminally inclined; sorting right from wrong would be too much work. He spends much of his time hanging out in his Mexico City apartment, which has, unusually, an empty lot next door on which, fittingly, nothing much happens. “My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another,” he says, in a “reign of inertia.” Rodrigo likes the unexamined and untroubled life, it seems, but things pick up, much to his chagrin, when he grudgingly takes a job and blunders his way into a marriage. Neither fits his lifestyle, which is doomed from the outset. “Living with Cecilia is self-inflicted torture,” he kvetches. “Her scorn for me grows with the weeks, festering like a tenacious parasite in the inches of mattress that separate us each night.” They wind up in his mother’s hometown, cousin to the ghostly plateau haunts of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, where an effusive Spaniard, a friend, perhaps more, of his mom’s, complicates his life with projects, even as Rodrigo wishes he could just be left alone to “sleep in late and walk in my underwear to the kitchen to drink—straight from the bottle—a swig of thick, repulsive milk.” The plot itself thickens, though not repulsively, as those projects widen to take in psychedelic cacti, astral projection, hypnosis, cultic doings, and expatriate hipsterdom: Rodrigo can barely keep up, and in the end, the simplicity of that empty lot beckons. The story is both critique and sendup of millennial slackerdom, and though it’s more character study than action-driven, what does happen is full of odd twists and surprises. Among the high points are Saldaña París’ exasperated but affectionate paeans to “the immense, beautiful city” that is Mexico’s capital.
Though a study of slothfulness and its discontents, a welcome book on which the author has clearly expended energy.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56689-430-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK REVIEW
by Daniel Saldaña París ; translated by Christina MacSweeney
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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