A marvelously interior novel, unique in its perceptions, that traffics both in the joy of invention and the sorrow of memory.
A young Argentinian woman leads a peripatetic existence—circling the globe in search of a way to stop moving. When she finally returns to the Southern Hemisphere, she stumbles upon a kind of belonging only to have it stripped away by two gruesome murders.
In Málaga she is called Luisa; in Barcelona, Lola; but regardless of the narrator's uncertain name and changing life story, the reader knows her intimately through the disarming simplicity of her voice. Dimópulos’ main character is the daughter of a methodically nihilist physicist and has been raised to view every part of her world as wholly conditional. She leaves Buenos Aries for Madrid when she is 23, in part as a form of escape from her father’s expectations. At first, the narrator is content to “play…at the artist’s life,” rooming with a Uruguayan guitar player, smoking hashish, and “[worrying], ostensibly, about the grim fate of the world.” Soon enough, however, she begins to feel her prototypical brand of restless alienation and launches herself into hapless continental wandering. From Madrid to Almagro, from Málaga to Heidelberg to Berlin, from Greece to Tunisia, back to Buenos Aires and down to the tip of Patagonia, the narrator creates lives marked by repetition, simplicity, entangled passions, and, ultimately, the freedom to disassemble her identity and start again. Along the way, she intersects with a cast of characters—acerbic doña Carmen, uber-capitalist Stefan, earnest Alexander, and the forlorn Julia and her young son, Kolya—all of whom try to make a space which will entice her to stay. It is not until she signs on as a seasonal laborer at the Patagonian mountain farm of Marco Cupin and his mother that she discovers a place where she can finally “recline without a shred of skepticism, trusting completely in the resilience of chairs and beds,” a place where she can become “a magnificent animal: soft, compact, whole.” When that illusory wholeness is stripped away by the murders of Marco and his mother, the narrator begins to weave together the disparate threads of her many identities into a slim, contradictory, thorny assemblage of memories, impressions, and thoughts that do not define her life so much as observe it, scientifically, as if from a great distance.
A marvelously interior novel, unique in its perceptions, that traffics both in the joy of invention and the sorrow of memory.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945492-15-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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