Filloy, as translator Riley notes, is scarcely known in Latin America, much less the English-speaking world. This beguiling...
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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