A baffling, disappointing epic from an intriguing stylist.
Spanish author Calvo’s second novel, the first to be published in English, is a sprawling tale of sex, drugs, art thieves and family rivalries in modern-day Barcelona.
The heady mix of intellectual affairs and pop-culture absurdities, along with some questionable forays into metafiction, occasionally recalls David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). The plot loosely hangs on the moody frame of Lucas Giraut, an antiques dealer who’s in bed with Bocanegra, the seedy partner of his late father, to make a killing on some stolen Celtic paintings. He’s also doing battle with his mother, who’s making a play for the stock that Lucas owns in her husband’s firm; questioning the motivations of Bocanegra, who had a shady relationship with Giraut’s father and a Russian art thief; and managing an awkward relationship with his neighbor Valentina, a pubescent girl who has an unhealthy enthusiasm for Stephen King’s upcoming opus—which, incidentally, is also titled Wonderful World. Calvo’s novel includes excerpts from that book, in which a strangely perfect-seeming New World Order inevitably gives way to global panic, and that’s just one of many cultural references he tinkers with, from car ads to pop music (Bob Marley and Pink Floyd most prominently) to porn to X-Men comics to couture. But to what end? Calvo hints at apocalyptic themes throughout, and stray plot threads help give the story an end-of-days feel. But this novel about chaos is disconcertingly chaotic itself. The array of forgers, mobsters, cops, gallery owners and lawyers that Calvo introduces has verve, color and the occasional bit of bawdy humor, but little coherence. Irritatingly, that may be the intent: As the climax nears, Calvo riffs on the insincerity of plot and characterization. A chase scene, for instance, has “the atmosphere typical of the conclusion of a story.” It’s a tactic straight out of the postmodern playbook, but it’s no less a cop-out for that.
A baffling, disappointing epic from an intriguing stylist.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-155768-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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