A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn’t entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better...
Brilliant evocation of el otro México, “the other Mexico,” by the writer whose inspiration underlies Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Rulfo, who died in 1986, is best known for his odd novel Pedro Páramo, in which ghosts and living beings share the streets of a dusty town out in the middle of nowhere that may or may not belong on this plane of existence. Qualities of that bardolike place are evident in this similarly odd tale of Dionisio Pinzón, a youngish man who sets out to make his fortune in the unpleasant but widespread “sport” of cockfighting. With the long-suffering Bernarda, “a tough and attractive woman with a flashy rebozo worn across her chest,” he travels from town to town, off in the provinces away from the metropolis that, Rulfo suggests, Dionisio barely knows even exists. As he travels, Bernarda turns up at the oddest times; “her calling,” his godfather tells Dionisio, who wonders where he’s seen her before, “is to wander the earth, so it’s not hard to have seen her just about anywhere….” Though his golden cockerel falls in the ring in Jalisco, Bernarda brings him discipline and luck, eventually marrying him not out of love so much as loneliness. For his part, Dionisio, with his huge appetite for success, doesn’t always treat her as well as he should—but winds up, in an ending quite reminiscent of Pedro Páramo, not to be able to live without her. With the novella are collected several sketches and other writings, most of which speak to Rulfo’s preoccupations, chief among them death. “Death is immutable in space and time,” one reads. “It’s just death, without contradiction, not standing in contrast to absence or to presence.” Even so, the narrator warns, it’s bad form to make others weep when you go underground: “It’s a rebuke that endures and that weighs on those who have died.”
A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn’t entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better known.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941920-58-9
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Deep Vellum
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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