Cheer for every author who didn’t make the Modern Library’s Top 100, or even a single publisher’s acceptance pile: somebody has declared open season on Britain’s most undeservedly successful novelists. Amazonia Skreen doesn’t see why her own heartfelt fictional outpourings should have been rejected by the same publishers who trumpeted the rubbish of hacks like Adam Appleton, that delicate aesthete who also ghostwrote pornography on the side, or of Mick Roper, the pop singer who probably couldn’t even read the best-selling books issued under his name. Aided by her brawny, monosyllabic sidekick Tup Maul (whose hopeful response to each successful homicide is “Love now?”), she stages elaborately moralizing death scenes for Adam, Mick, and a bevy of other literary types: the self-merchandising success-story whose books are sold at his own coffeeshops; the half-anonymous co-dependent pair Amazonia intends to bring even closer in death; the crypto-fascist ranter of the roman-Ö-clef—all of them so excruciatingly familiar that it’s a pleasure to see the whole lot get their sanguinary comeuppance, especially at the hands (etc.) of the exotic and uninhibited Amazonia. The conceit is so appealing (the Modern Library meets House of Wax, with Sharon Stone in the Vincent Price role), and newcomer Rees is so obviously having a good time, that it seems both stuffy and reckless to complain that the plot device he’s chosen to add momentum and suspense to his series of Dantesque set-pieces(bad-hat Jack Jackson takes over the life of his twin brother, successful author David Jackson, when David succumbs to a miscalculated bout of erotic autoasphyxia, thereby unwittingly placing himself in all the peril David escaped by his timely demise) is so much less interesting than Amazonia’s gleefully lethal swipes at the literary establishment that you can hardly wait for the avenger to add this poseur’s scalp to her collection. An upscale black-comic equivalent of beach reading.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7472-5721-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.
A much-translated tale of plagues, priestly malfeasance, courtly love and the Seven Deadly Sins finds a satisfying new version in English.
The Decameron, as its Greek-derived name suggests, is a cycle of stories told over a period of 10 days by Florentines fleeing their city for the countryside in order to escape the devastating Black Death of 1348. Perched at the very point of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the author of those stories, Giovanni Boccaccio, was a narrative innovator: As translator Rebhorn notes in his long, circumstantial introduction, medieval readers were fond of grab bags of stories, but “there is no precedent in Italian literature for Boccaccio’s use of a frame narrative to unify his collection.” Boccaccio borrowed liberally from previously published anthologies, but as Rebhorn also shows, he added plenty of new twists and arranged his material to form a thematic arc: Day 1, for instance, centers on characters who got out of trouble thanks to their native wit, while Day 4 centers on the character flaws that keep people from getting what they want. What so many of his characters want, it happens, are things frowned upon in polite society, as his ribald tale of the poor cuckolded owner of a conveniently large barrel so richly shows. Rebhorn’s translation of Boccaccio’s sprawling narrative, accompanied by informative endnotes, is sometimes marked by odd shifts in levels of diction, often within the same sentence (“That’s when I felt the guy was going too far...and it seemed to me that I should tell you about it so that you could see how he rewards you for that unwavering fidelity of yours”); it is otherwise clear and idiomatic, however, and Rebhorn capably represents Boccaccio’s humor and sharp intelligence.
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06930-3
Page Count: 1264
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Haunting and superbly crafted, this is a magical book from a writer of immense talent and intelligence.
The lives of three generations of women in Jamaica intersect as they try to build better lives.
Margot, a 30-year-old desk clerk at a hotel in Jamaica, has fallen into a side business of sex with the white men who visit the island looking for poor women to exploit. This, of course, is not the life Margot wants. She only does it to support her younger sister, Thandi, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who's destined to be successful and “make everything better” for the family. Thandi, however, is more interested in being thought beautiful and the type of success that goes along with that, spending her extra money on skin-lightening creams to turn her dark skin whiter. Thandi's and Margot’s tales intertwine with the story of their abusive mother, Delores, and the rest of their poverty-stricken community, set against the backdrop of wealthy white tourists. Margot finds a temporary refuge from the constant barrage of work and men in her romantic relationship with a local woman named Verdene, but she can't escape the fear of violence that same-sex couples in their society face. And, as past secrets come to a head, the poor black and wealthy white worlds of Jamaica collide. This debut novel from Dennis-Benn is an astute social commentary on the intricacies of race, gender, wealth inequality, colorism, and tourism. But these themes rise organically from the narrative rather than overwhelming it. Here are visceral, profound writing and invigorating characters. Here, too, is the deep and specific sensation of experience. Consider teenage Thandi’s first awareness of being watched by the boy she likes: “a pulse stirs between her legs and she hurries down the path, holding it in like pee."
Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-176-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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