Engrossing, fiercely intelligent fiction redolent of another era.
Hemingway casts a shadow on this novel of romance and student rebellion in postwar Spain, inspired by the author’s Harper Prize–winning Vangel Griffin (1960).
The year is 1956, and Jude Winterside, disillusioned with his life in New York, makes himself a deal: He’ll leave his wife and career to become a student at the University in Madrid, and if, after one year, he has not “found some reason to continue living longer,” he’ll swallow pills and brandy and enter the abyss. Fortunately for him, events occur that pierce his ennui and make him feel alive for the first time. He meets Alonso, an idealistic but disturbed critic of Generalissimo Franco and the Falangistas, and Alonso’s sister, Satry, with whom Jude begins a romantic relationship. Woven into the action, in ways reminiscent of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Hugo’s Les Miserables and Papa’s The Sun Also Rises, are passages of spoken and internal dialogue that grapple with larger philosophical issues. What is the nature of love? What is honor? Is all life pain? These are earnest explorations in a riveting story but with a few flaws. In apparently reworking his prized novel from 50 years ago, Lobsenz (Succession, 2008, etc.) presumably intended, at least in part, to make it more relevant to modern audiences; however, his skillful but mannered prose seems lifted directly from that earlier era. Most sentences are in the active voice and contractions are often avoided; enigmatic non sequiturs abound in what could only be a conscious emulation of Hemingway, a hero to many writers of Lobsenz’s generation. The romantic duo of Jude and Satry also seems an obvious and intentional reincarnation of Jake and Lady Brett, although Jude’s impotence is only metaphorical, and there’s nothing androgynous about Satry. The meditations on love, sex and gender seem dated—a reflection of the story’s original time period—but could have benefitted from a more nuanced treatment, acknowledging the passage of years since Vangel Griffin’s publication. Still, there are moments in the story—atop the tower in Avila, in a seedy Madrid bar—when a deep understanding of character and place emerges from the spare, narrow style, encouraging readers to forgive its limitations.
Engrossing, fiercely intelligent fiction redolent of another era.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466303386
Page Count: 310
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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