by Gabriela Tagliavini ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2001
Toying with concepts of time, art, and reality, Tagliavini's interesting experiment tries too hard to be symbolic and...
Argentinean-born, L.A.-resident screenwriter/director Tagliavini makes her fiction debut with this tale of an odd, disgruntled old woman and an abused ten-year-old boy fleeing their hospital beds in Mexico to search for lost loved ones north of the border.
Originally published in Argentina but "adapted for English-speaking audiences" by the author, the novel focuses on 69-year-old Carla Anone, who hates everything: "groups, societies fraternities, families, people who need others." She's also obsessed with color, as well as with the sailor she met when she was 19. Carla, who "only cared about writing," was looking for a man to be the subject of her screenplay. Enter Dmitri, who stole her heart—and her watch. "I knew right away that he was the character I wanted for my screenplay, a man who generated questions," explains Carla. She wrote down what she thought Dmitri was thinking; she interpreted situations the way she thought he was experiencing them. But when she discovered that he was illiterate, she felt betrayed and left him. Forty-nine years later, dying of leukemia, she is determined to track him down and kill him, while Juan, whose mother's violence landed him in the hospital, wants to find his father and celebrate Christmas. In chapters named for colors, the action alternates between the unlikely pair's road trip and Carla's past, which includes a father who worked for the FBI in the ’50s, flushing out communists in Hollywood when not beating Carla with wooden hangers and submerging her in tubs of water. She follows Dmitri's trail to East L.A., where she meets his wife and learns that his real name is Joe. The culmination of the journey leads both Carla and Juan to uncover the truth about what they really want and what they need—each other, of course.
Toying with concepts of time, art, and reality, Tagliavini's interesting experiment tries too hard to be symbolic and lovingly weird, though it's ultimately quite touching.Pub Date: April 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-928746-17-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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