Not much story here, but the vivid characterizations and highly sensual style more than make up for it. Chavez's heroine is...
Funny, raunchy novel from the author of American Book Award–winner Face of an Angel (1994), this is about lonely women in a dusty bordertown.
Tere Ávila is a school aide at Cabritoville Elementary in New Mexico with little to do after hours but check out the same losers in the same bars and commiserate with her girlfriends, fellow members of the Pedro Infante Fan Club. In their eyes, the long-dead Mexican actor is the only real man around; they watch his movies over and over, sighing at his sensual good looks. Tere would give anything to find someone like Pedro. Her first husband didn't amount to much, and she scarcely gave him a thought after their quickie divorce. These days, she settles for fiery but ultimately unsatisfying trysts at a sleazy local motel with Lucio Valadez, the married father of a six-year-old girl. Tere feels guilty, but loneliness feels worse, and she ignores her practical friend Irma's advice to dump the guy and get on with her life. Lucio’s not all that wonderful, but he's all she's got, even if he is preoccupied with several family businesses and a little too eager to improve her, starting with her vocabulary. His gift of love: a dictionary. Much to Irma's disgust, Tere doesn't throw it at him but reads it instead. After all, didn't she study the biography of St. Teresa of Avila that Irma gave her too? But Tere is consumed with shame and regret when Lucio's little daughter sees them necking in the school parking lot. He immediately breaks off the affair, fearing his wife's wrath, and there's nothing Tere can do to change his mind. But the night is young, and her old flame, Chago, is back in town . . . she just might get lucky.
Not much story here, but the vivid characterizations and highly sensual style more than make up for it. Chavez's heroine is passionate, foolish, and wonderfully human.Pub Date: April 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-19411-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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