A splendid realization of its rich subject, and Tuck’s best so far.
The notorious Irish courtesan who also inspired Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch presides regally over Tuck’s impressively researched, lushly written latest.
The episodic tale picks up (the historical) “Ella” Lynch’s story in 1854 in Paris, where she attracts the attention of Paraguayan prince regent Francisco Solano Lopez (“Franco”), who appropriates the statuesque beauty, and brings her home, to “transform Paraguay into a country exactly like France.” Tuck (stories: Limbo, and the Other Places I Have Lived, 2002; etc.) skillfully distributes dozens of narrative vignettes among these two impetuously matched lovers, their servants and miscellaneous acquaintances and correspondents, and numerous foreigners (“engineers, architects, physicians, all eager to make their fortunes in this rich new world”). Franco succeeds his tyrannical father Carlos as dictator, and spends his country’s resources lavishly, acquiring nearly as many mistresses as possessions, while Ella, continually pregnant, bears him five surviving sons. Tuck contrives numerous episodes that suggest the cruelty and violence underlying this emergent nation’s veneer of sophisticated self-indulgence—and particularly Franco’s ebullient masculine charm. And when diplomatic relations with neighboring republics are brusquely severed, Paraguay is drawn into a long, enervating war against a Triple Alliance comprising Brazil, Argentina, and “Banda Oriental” (later Uruguay). The story’s latter half is a swiftly paced chronicle of military defeats by vastly more numerous opposition forces, starvation, capture, torture, and execution. Prominent among the figures swept up by Franco’s self-destructive momentum are his cupiditous and treacherous siblings, an English stonemason hired to build his presidential palace, a scholarly “apothecary general”—and Ella’s beloved gray mare Mathilde. It all ends smashingly, with several views of Ella and her remaining sons, escaped to London and thence Paris, but not from the nightmarish history that has changed them forever.
A splendid realization of its rich subject, and Tuck’s best so far.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-620944-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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