Almost two decades after One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez has delivered another long, woolly, at times wonderful but consistently elective novel. Elective in the sense that, like One Hundred Years (a book more grazed-in than fully read, the candid reader will admit), you can loll in the lushness and the brilliant details and the generous metaphors, but getting up and walking out of Garcia Marquez's imagination is fairly easy to do: it's a book that doesn't hold on to you. But maybe here it doesn't mean to—it's a story of a decades-long love triangle that bridges the turn of the century in a Caribbean sea-coast town. The principals are a merchant-trader, Florentino Ariza; the sheltered and beautiful Fermina Daza; and the starchy physician who marries her, Dr. Juvenal Urbino de la Calle. Ariza is a born lover, patient beyond belief, in love with love (platonic and sexual), an eroticist of impressive concentration—and his conquests and griefs at least keep the book moving chronologically. Which it only rarely seems to want to do; Garcia Marquez's talent is for peripherals: tastes, comments, colors, sounds, all flocking spectacularly inside any given paragraph like iron filings. The style everywhere is rich and good-humored, but, except for isolated scenes (such as the doctor's confession to his wife of a late-in-life indiscretion), it focuses on the paragraph more than on the chapter. And little finally distinguishes these gorgeous paragraphs—story-turns never undermine them, and you suspect they're there to be admired more than felt. Still, there's almost nothing here (thankfully) of Garcia Marquez's cloying political ironies dressed up as mysteries and cosmogonies; and the stylish sexual histories are fun and will be popular. Broad and brilliant as it is, though, there's an awful lot about a little here—a candy-box of a novel: more paper slots and creamy centers than something hard to bite down on.
Pub Date: April 29, 1988
ISBN: 0307387143
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
BOOK REVIEW
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
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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