THE MATTER OF DESIRE

Name: THE MATTER OF DESIRE
Author: Edmundo Paz Soldán
ISBN: 0-618-39557-1

by Edmundo Paz Soldán ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2004

Pedro, like all overly cerebral protagonists, thinks more than he acts, and when he does act, he often gets it wrong. In...

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A tale of equivocal heroes, treacherous revolutionaries, and rejected love as an intellectual struggles to learn the truth about his family.

Bolivian author Paz Soldán, currently teaching at Cornell, evokes a gritty urban milieu permeated by pop culture and technology as he tells the story of thirtysomething Pedro Zabalgo. An assistant professor with a Berkeley Ph.D., Pedro is teaching courses in Latin American politics at the University of Madison in upstate New York, where he has met and fallen in love with graduate student Ashley. In alternate chapters, Pedro recalls how he met Ashley, how they fell in love, and how their affair developed. Now on sabbatical in Rio Fugitivo, Bolivia, Pedro is trying to find out the truth about his father, Pedro Reissig, who was a revolutionary hero of the 1970s, as well as author of the cult novel Berkeley, which, with cryptic references and ambiguous protagonists, evokes the turbulent years he spent studying, like his son, at Berkeley. Before he left Madison, Pedro broke up with—but can’t forget—Ashley, who subsequently has married another man. Memories of her, and uncertainties about the circumstances of his father’s death, preoccupy him, and he finds it difficult to begin his search. His father, whose body was never found, was believed to have been betrayed by a colleague who led the government soldiers to their meeting place. As he pores over Berkeley for insights into his father, and advises a druglord on his memoirs, there are mysterious bombings in the city. Pedro also hears conflicting stories about his father and begins to suspect his uncle David, a noted setter of cryptic puzzles and the only conspirator to have survived, of being responsible for the old man’s death.

Pedro, like all overly cerebral protagonists, thinks more than he acts, and when he does act, he often gets it wrong. In all: more craft than art.

Pub Date: April 5, 2004

ISBN: 0-618-39557-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NORTE
by Edmundo Paz Soldán translated by Valerie Miles

- BOOK REVIEW
TURING’S DELIRIUM
by Edmundo Paz Soldán & translated by Lisa Carter

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.