From noted Portuguese writer Saramago (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1993, etc.), a playful "what-if" tale — what if the earth were to crack and the Iberian Peninsula started sailing across the Atlantic? — that also slyly satirizes current European and international politics. As in all good fables, the catastrophe here is preceded by ominous but random happenings that lend an air of bogus authority and mystery to a story that is to be enjoyed as much for itself as for the potshots it takes. In Portugal, Joana Carda, who has just left her husband, scratches the ground with an elm bough, and the line cannot be erased; the famous barkless dogs of Cerb‚re suddenly begin to bark; Joaquim Sassa throws a heavy stone into the sea that lands far out of sight; Jos‚ Anaio, out on a morning stroll, is followed by a flock of starlings; a widow, Maria Guavaira, finds an old sock that endlessly unravels; and in Spain, aging Pedro Orce gets up from his chair and feels the earth tremble beneath his feet. Next, cracks appear along the Pyrenees mountains, and, as they rapidly widen, Spain and Portugal are soon cut off from the rest of Europe. Tourists panic; local peasants occupy the now-empty hotels. As the peninsula heads out into the Atlantic, abandoning the disputed Rock of Gibraltar along the way, politicians make ineffectual statements and vague promises of help; European youths, declaring "We are Iberians too," riot in sympathy. And while the peninsula just misses the Azores, seems bound for Newfoundland, then alters its course and sails south, the long thread that Maria had unraveled somehow brings the apparent prognosticators of the event together. By car and then by wagon, they wander across the land, finding love and adventure along the way, as well as an understanding of "how all things in this world are linked together." A splendidly imagined epic voyage on an unlikely ship manned by political trimmers as well as the loving in heart. A fabulous fable.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-185198-0
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
I loved it — and to my mind — it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, — the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best. Once again, as in Tortilla Flat, he makes no effort to stress "social significance". To be sure, one can strain at his underlying meanings and say that such people should not exist in today's plenty — but no one can argue that they wouldn't exist again tomorrow if eliminated today. Flotsam and jetsam of humanity, — the gang of boys who could get jobs but didn't except when emergency demanded — and then quit when the emergency passed. Lee's felicitous acquiescence to their thinly veiled urging that they become caretakers of his newly acquired shack; their neighbors in the deserted lot; Doc, high mogul of the marine laboratory, doctor to the neighborhood on occasion, beloved by all; and the others who made up the dregs of Cannery Row. The story builds up to first one and then another climax, as the boys plan a party for Doc. There's humor — and pathos — and sheer good story telling as the incidents unfold. The plot is tenuous, held together by the characters. But Steinbeck succeeds in making them human, likable, out of drawing but never in caricature. And one feels that to him, too, they are part of the flavor of a folk legend of today.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1944
ISBN: 0140187375
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1944
Novelist/historian Carr (The Devil's Soldier, 1991, etc.) combines his two preferred modes with a meaty, if overslung, serial- killer quest set in 1896 New York. A series of gruesome murders and mutilations of heartrendingly young prostitutes—boys dressed as girls—reunites three alumni of William James' pioneering Harvard psychology lectures: Times reporter John Schuyler Moore, eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (called, after the fashion of the time, an ``alienist''), and New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Despite Moore's skepticism about Roosevelt's plan to put Kreizler on the case (``You'd be better off hiring an African witch doctor,'' he says about his old friend), Kreizler steadily compiles a profile of the killer based on a combination of forensic and psychological evidence. The man they're looking for is over six feet tall; about 30 years old; an expert mountaineer; either a priest or a man from a strongly religious background; a veteran of some time among Indians. As Moore tours Manhattan's nastiest nightspots and Kreizler's net closes around a suspect, Carr fills out his narrative with obligatory cameos by Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, J.P. Morgan, Anthony Comstock, and Franz Boas, and didactic digressions on the rise of Bertillon measurements, fingerprints, the Census Bureau, and gourmet dining (courtesy of Delmonico's) in America. The result is somehow gripping yet lifeless, as evocative period detail jostles with a cast of characters who are, for the most part, as pallid as the murder victims. Still, it must be said that the motivation of the demented killer is worked out with chilling, pitying conviction. Unremarkable as a genre thriller, then, but highly satisfactory as fictionalized social history. (Film rights to Paramount; Literary Guild Alternate Selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41779-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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