Ho-hum as either fiction or history.
First English edition of a 1969 novel by the renowned Mexican author (Tinisima, 1996): a fictionalized life of a soldadera who followed the Mexican Revolution’s soldiers on campaign that reads like a poorly edited oral biography.
The story is based on the experiences of Jesúsa Palancares de Aguilar, a cantankerous old woman in her 80s when Poniatowska, an experienced journalist, interviewed her. She presents Jesúsa’s lengthy narrative with almost no historical or social framework, apparently assuming readers’ intimate knowledge of the Revolution’s politics and warring factions. Even Poniatowska’s introduction to this edition provides little beyond her impassioned description of Jesúsa’s poverty in the 1960s, when the interviews were conducted. Perhaps something is lost in the translation, or maybe time has softened the urgency of Jesúsa’s plight. Certainly her experiences could be the raw material for a great historical novel: her mother dead, five-year-old Jesúsa is left with a shiftless, philandering father whose one act of kindness is making her a doll from a dead squirrel. She accompanies him when he goes off to fight with General Venustiano Carranza and is forced at age 14 to wed a 17-year-old soldier who beats her repeatedly. Jesúsa describes the day-to-day difficulties and atrocities of life during the Revolution but rarely comments on its political aspects. Captured by the Zapatistas, she's escorted home by Zapata himself, whom she describes as “a good-hearted man [not] interested in being president like all the rest.” Pancho Villa fares less well: “He didn’t fight like a man . . . that Villa was an ape.” Jesúsa’s travails and privations following the Revolution culminate in her espousal of a bizarre brand of spiritualism, the Obra Espiritual, that encompasses her belief in reincarnation. She claims she was an evil queen in an earlier existence and accepts this life’s miseries as her just punishment.
Ho-hum as either fiction or history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16819-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A round-Robbins on the themes of scent, so-called "floral consciousness," and immortality—skipping through time and space, but offering a little old-fashioned storytelling charm along with the usual cute/hip doodling. In one of the two parallel plot-lines here, Robbins juggles the separate attempts of various parfumiers around the world to come up with a perfume (upon a jasmine base) that will outenchant any previous concoction: Madame Devalier in New Orleans is feverishly experimenting; so is her adopted daughter Priscilla in Seattle; and the megs-company LeFever is also hard at work in Paris. Meanwhile, in the other main plot, we follow King Alobar—a Dark Ages hero—through his global wanderings: he eventually reaches India, meeting a widow named Kudra; both of them are in flight from Death; and both eventually, through the direct intervention of the decrepit god Pan, actually achieve immortality—even learning how to capture the immortality-essence in bottled-liquid form. So ultimately, of course, these two plot-strands will link up—as Alobar time-travels up to the present, providing the evolutionary missing-link to "floral consciousness". . . and teaming up with a Timothy Learylike outlaw scientist, Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, who adds a bit of new-age theory to Robbins' usual flower-power rhetoric. ("Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.") As in all of Robbins' novels, there is much that's juvenile and insufferable here: terminally cute asides and many, many groaners—e.g., "a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse." Still, the mundane/exotic enterprise of making perfume offers a rich basis for Robbins' half-credible, half-cartoonish explorations. And, thanks to its lively sweep through time and geography, this may be his most agreeable book ever: relaxed, readably sequential, goofily lyrical—with some feather-weight appeal for non-fans as well as the usual Robbins readership.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1984
ISBN: 0553348981
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1984
IN THE NEWS
An evocative work about love, fate and redemption.
Up beyond Asheville, near where Gunter Mountain falls into Tennessee, evil has come to preach in a house of worship where venomous snakes and other poisons are sacraments.
Cash’s debut novel explores Faulkner/O’Connor country, a place where folks endure a hard life by clinging to God’s truths echoing from hardscrabble churches. With Southern idiom as clear as crystal mountain air, Cash weaves the narrative from multiple threads. Jess Hall is the 9-year-old son of Ben and Julie and beloved younger brother of gentle Stump, his mute, autistic sibling. Clem Barefield is county sheriff, a man with a moral code as tough, weathered and flexible as his gun belt. Adelaide Lyle, once a midwife, is now community matriarch of simple faith and solid conscience. Carson Chambliss is pastor of River Road Church of Christ. He has caught Stump spying, peering into the bedroom of his mother Julie, while she happened to be entertaining the amoral pastor. Julie may have lapsed into carnal sin, but she is also a holy fool. Chambliss convinces Julie to bring Stump to the church to be cured by the laying on of hands. There, Stump suffers a terrible fate. Cash’s characters are brilliant: Chambliss, scarred by burns, is as remorseless as one of his rattlesnakes; Addie, loyal to the old ways, is still strong enough to pry the church’s children away from snake-handling services; Barefield is gentle, empathetic and burdened by tragedy. Stump’s brother Jess is appealingly rendered—immature, confused and feeling responsible for and terrified by the evil he senses and sees around him. As lean and spare as a mountain ballad, Cash’s novel resonates perfectly, so much so that it could easily have been expanded to epic proportions.
An evocative work about love, fate and redemption.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208814-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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