A finely crafted novel of either serendipity or fate—we never know.
An old man and a young woman sit next to each other on a flight. When the man dies and the woman walks off with a small wooden box he'd been carrying to show his son, their parallel personal histories become entwined, showing the serendipity of life.
This is a small novel with significant depth. Fàbregas has crafted a story of connectedness using language (Spanish, Dutch—and now English in translation) to take the sting out of the chaos of living. A Dutch woman speaks with a Spanish man on a flight to Amsterdam, and when he dies upon landing we become witness to two parallel lives—the man’s recounting of his marriage and family and the search the woman has been on for years now, looking for the “angel” who saved her life as a girl when her own sense of family was lost. The woman meets the man's son as the novel nears a close, learning he has been looking for her to find out about the last moments of his father’s life. Names become important in both searches as links, as clues. The unnamed dead man’s son, Arjen, has the first name of the young man who reached into a burning automobile and carried the woman, then an 8-year-old girl, to safety, though she was made an orphan in the accident. A list of names of "ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE” becomes the Holy Grail when, four years later, the girl, now 12, returns to the town where the accident occurred and cajoles the authorities for a list of names—those who may have been witnesses—and then begins her long quest to find her savior. Fàbregas uses alternating chapters for first-person narration of each protagonist’s story. Chapters labeled “Him” tell the tale of an emigrant from Spain to Holland, working in the Philips television factory to fund his family back home. He finds love and marries Willemien, and their life together is one of bitterly sweet challenges. “Her” chapters reveal the young woman presumably in search of her “angel” but truly in search of herself.
A finely crafted novel of either serendipity or fate—we never know.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-84-944262-5-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Hispabooks
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
