As sexy and brief as the love it describes.
A steamy tale of an affair that holds the threat of destruction, in Shigekumi’s follow-up to her debut (A Bridge Between Us, 1995).
Lily Soto has a perfect life—doesn’t she? Well, calm and lovely as it may have been (“They would take a day trip, skim across the surface of a sea so peaceful that waves lapped but did not rise up”), life with Joseph has come to feel about as attractive as his job at the morgue. Which isn’t to say that Lily can’t grow aroused watching her husband perform an autopsy—she can and does—but only that something’s missing. That missing thing arrives in the form of Perish, a colleague who announces his obsession with Lily. Lily is still breast-feeding her youngest, yet just the idea of this unlikely love—he’s married, too—triggers a torrid affair. Perish is missing a leg, but that’s somehow part of his allure (“Like the leg that isn’t there, what is missing and hidden defines the space between them”). Lily’s love for Joseph continues to diminish, a pattern not helped by her senile live-in father, who sometimes sneaks tumesce’d into the bedroom to watch the failing couple make love. Divorce looms as things grow worse, but then one day Lily has a seizure in public and, because of his missing leg, Perish is unable to help her. She winds up in the hospital, where a rape kit shows semen and possible rape. Will the lovers get caught red-handed? Or might Lily really have been raped, despite Perish’s insistence that he watched her every minute until the ambulance arrived? When the affair ends, only ghosts, corpses, and love on the brink of death will be left behind: “Now the world takes shape in the garden, where tomatoes with worm holes the size of dimes shrivel on the vine, bugs eat the unpicked squash, and weeds grow between the furrows . . . .”
As sexy and brief as the love it describes.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31183-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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