A disappointment.
A young woman in second-century Rome progresses from pampered aristocrat to Christian martyr in this second novel from Italian screenwriter Ferri (Enchantments, 2005).
Cecilia’s 15th birthday marks her entry into the marriage market, and the headstrong young Roman is not a happy camper. “It was a HORRIBLE birthday,” she tells her diary. Since the early deaths of her siblings, only-child Cecilia has been given the privileges of a male heir. Her doting father Paulus is a Prefect, an important imperial official, while her less affectionate mother, Lucilla, remains in mourning for the babies she lost. Cecilia wants to stay footloose for another year, hanging out with her best friend Lucretia, whose solution to marriage to an older man is taking a lover. Her diary entries, rather than immersing the reader in another time and place, are reminiscent of the writings of a moody contemporary teenager with a difficult mom (Lucilla has become the frenzied disciple of an Egyptian goddess). But it’s the mother who gets her way, and Cecilia is still 15 when she’s married off to rich, handsome Valerian. The marriage quickly turns sour; Cecilia discovers he is two-timing her with the maid. There are potentially dramatic moments here, including the Chariot Games in which Valerian’s jealous brother poisons horses, but Ferri fails to exploit them. She cannot manage transitions. One moment Cecilia and Valerian are engaged in torrid, adversarial love-making, the next Cecilia has had a vision of God’s grace and is groping for “a language like feathers, like embroidery” to describe her newfound Christianity, which leads her to associate with slaves and minister to outcasts. There’s yet another missed opportunity as Ferri passes over Cecilia’s betrayal by that evil brother-in-law; next thing we know, she’s in a cell. There’s little suspense as a magistrate interrogates her and Cecilia, armored now in improbably high-flown rhetoric, stands by her faith and goes serenely to her death.
A disappointment.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-933372-87-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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