Cuban mysterian Padura (The Man Who Loved Dogs, 2013, etc.) returns with another installment in his Mario Conde detective series, this one following a Rembrandt portrait over centuries and continents.
Conde, as Padura’s fans know, is a former cop–turned-investigator, suspicious of everyone and everything. It turns out that, to supplement his income as all Cubans on the island must, he’s developed a sideline in the book trade—and has done pretty well for himself as a scout for one Yoyi the Pigeon, an entrepreneurial young “engineer who had never touched a screw or entered any job sites.” It’s in that guise that Conde falls in with a painter, Daniel Kaminsky, who is on the track of a missing treasure: long ago, an ancestor had come into the possession of a small Rembrandt portrait that had traveled with the family across a bitterly anti-Semitic Europe for centuries until arriving in Cuba with a shipload of refugees aboard the ill-fated Saint Louis; that painting, writes Padura, had variously been “a secret, a family heirloom, and, in the end, a jewel on which the last Kaminskys to enjoy owning it would place their greatest hopes for salvation.” Why a Jew of modest means should have been carrying a work of art by the Master in the first place turns out to be the crux of a story that Padura spins off to incorporate numerous threads—in fact, four main strands of them in four separate books that run backward, biblically, from Daniel to Genesis, and that hop from place to place: Havana, Miami, Krakow, Amsterdam. There are real heretics behind the title of Padura’s book, but the term embraces all sorts of outsiders, from Yoyi, who represents something like the fall of socialist man, to young Cuban neo-rebels (“hearing two lesbian confessions on the same day…exceeded his capacity for understanding”) and the hidden marrano Jews of the New World.
Padura capably works here in Perez-Reverte territory, where art and ideas meet mayhem. Smart and satisfying though too long by 100 pages.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-71678-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
High-stakes weepmeister Sparks (A Walk to Remember, 1999, etc.) opts for a happy ending his fourth time out. His writing has improved—though it's still the equivalent of paint-by-numbers—and he makes use this time of at least a vestige of credible psychology.
That vestige involves the deep dark secret—it has something to do with his father's death when son Taylor was nine—that haunts kind, good 36-year-old local contractor Taylor McAden and makes him withdraw from relationships whenever they start getting serious enough to maybe get permanent. He's done this twice before, and now he does it again with pretty and sweet single mother Denise Holton, age 29, who's moved from Atlanta to Taylor's town of Edenton, North Carolina, in order to devote her time more fully to training her four-year-old son Kyle to overcome the peculiar impediment he has that keeps him from achieving normal language acquisition. Okay? When Denise has a car accident in a bad storm, she's rescued by volunteer fireman Taylor—who also rescues little Kyle after he wanders away from his injured mom in the storm. Love blooms in the weeks that follow—until Taylor suddenly begins putting on the brakes. What is it that holds him back, when there just isn't any question but that he loves Denise and vice versa-not to mention that he's "great" with Kyle, just like a father? It will require a couple of near-death experiences (as fireman Taylor bravely risks his life to save others); emotional steadiness from the intelligent, good, true Denise; and the terrible death of a dear and devoted friend before Taylor will come to the point at last of confiding to Denise the terrible memory of how his father died—and the guilt that's been its legacy to Taylor. The psychological dam broken, love will at last be able to flow.
More Hallmarkiana, from a shameless expert in the genre.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52550-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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