Once again, de Berniäres turns magic realism into a literary Latin American theme park where the familiar attractions— levitating villagers, centuries-old wanderers, protean plants and animals—appear with nothing new or original added. Mythic hero Dionisio Vivo—fighter of druglords in Se§or Viva and the Coca Lord—is now living in the remote Andean village of Cochadebajo. Vivo, the father of 30 children, though he still mourns his beloved, long-dead Anica, is a national columnist—the country's conscience—as well as one of the defenders of the village against the assault by bloodthirsty religious fanatics bent on rooting out heresy. Plot, though, is secondary—it's here only to provide successive set-pieces in which various characters can display their larger-than-life vices, virtues, and talents: ailing Cardinal Guzman is haunted by the demons of his corruptions, torments that are cured only by surgery—his tumor turns out to be an unborn twin—and his decision to leave the church and do good with his longtime mistress and their dead son, Christobal, reborn as a humming bird. Also included: a Mexican musicologist married to twins Lena and Ena; the ghost of Thomas Aquinas, who, appalled by the fanatical priests' sincerity, wishes he'd never written; Professor Luis, whose inventions save the village from destruction; conquistadors in rusting armor; a false priest who levitates and quotes salacious classics; jungle cats that eat strawberries and chocolates; a corrupt, sexually obsessed national-president; an ancient, starving, Quixote-like knight in search of ``the beast'' he must kill. And the grand climax, the battle that defeats the crusading fanatics, is undercut by a frenetic display of ambitious but old-hat literary virtuosity. Faux fiction that fails because—not in spite of—the writer's best efforts.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12583-2
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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