A novel that strives to encompass drug violence, faith, and sexuality, though not entirely cohesively.
Two friends take divergent paths through the priesthood in war-torn Colombia, keeping their homosexuality under wraps.
Manrique’s sixth novel (Cervantes Street, 2012, etc.) is set against the drug-fueled violence that’s afflicted the author’s native Colombia for decades—families “hacked to pieces” by soldiers, severed heads displayed as threats by bandoleros. The church is one of the few escape hatches out of poverty and bloodshed, so two young men, Lucas and Ignacio, are nudged into the priesthood. They meet in high school in the early 1990s, and though they have different temperaments—Lucas is gregarious and earnest, Ignacio moody and headstrong—they quickly develop a romantic affection for each other that’s complicated by both church doctrine and their different backgrounds. (“[Ignacio] was an Indian and Lucas was a white-looking mestizo,” a particular pressure point for Ignacio.) The two wind up at the same seminary, they launch a relationship, keeping their affair hidden for the next decade and a half while they lead separate parishes in Bogota. (Ignacio’s is a particularly challenging assignment, filled with refugees from drug violence.) Stress, shame, questioning God, and a descent into drugs and reckless sex ensue, which Manrique depicts more in a spirit of lament than moral judgment—the noble urge to do God’s work warps under the pressure to remain chaste and quiet our affections. Still, the story’s arc leans toward melodrama, evoking a bygone era of gay romance where a lover was all but obligated to die for perceived sins. That's tempered somewhat by Manrique's thoughtful use of the theological backdrop following Ignacio’s mournful contemplation of God as a being “drunk on his infinite inventiveness,” using men as playthings.
A novel that strives to encompass drug violence, faith, and sexuality, though not entirely cohesively.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61775-718-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Kaylie Jones/Akashic
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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