CATERVA

Name: CATERVA
Author: Juan Filloy
ISBN: 978-1-62897-036-4

by Juan Filloy ; translated by Brendan Riley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2015

Filloy, as translator Riley notes, is scarcely known in Latin America, much less the English-speaking world. This beguiling...

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Obscure in its native Argentina, a grand modernist novel finds new life in a vigorous translation.

In Spanish, a caterva is a crowd—just a bunch of people crammed into one place. As Filloy’s novel opens, we find an assembly of drifters under a highway bridge, “not clustered in a heap like stones and boulders that just come rolling randomly along…but rather washed there by virtue of a secret current.” Grumbling about the surroundings and the smell, the lowering clouds smelling, in Filloy’s striking image, like sex, while the wind blows like a “swarm of flies,” the feeling is more Beckett than Joyce, the latter being the modernist to whom Filloy is most often compared. The tale soon explodes beyond even these messy confines, as Abd-ul “Katanga” ben-Hixem—for so one of the wanderers is named—and companions, who, it turns out, have a more political purpose than we might have originally thought, scatter across an aoristic landscape, anarchistic gentlemen of the road. (“Neither drifters, sir, nor lousy,” Katanga politely tells the menacing constabulary.) The novel is very much of its time, born in 1937, which is attested to by some of its references (to fascism, Nazi spies, and that newfangled thing called a Swiss army knife); but as it swirls into allegory, something like a mashup of Cervantes, Bulgakov, and Pynchon, it becomes exuberant in its strangeness: “Oh, the victory of superimposing organic full-frontal nudity, with neither briefs nor maillot, upon the mockery of well-catalogued social perversions!” Ever more hallucinatory, with visions of the heads of South America’s presidents shrunken “to the size of a fist,” Filloy’s big shaggy dog of a tale defies easy description: it’s odd, allusive, and satirical, and it’s also a lot of fun.

Filloy, as translator Riley notes, is scarcely known in Latin America, much less the English-speaking world. This beguiling yarn merits him many new readers.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-62897-036-4

Page Count: 375

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990

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Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.