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
BOOK REVIEW
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.
If you don’t have a woeful countenance already, this knight’s tale will slap one on you right quick.
It’s 1483, and down in Cornwall, a knight is writing a farewell to his children against the possibility that he may fall in battle in a war against the Thane of Cawdor. Not the one whose title King Macbeth usurped 400 years earlier, it would seem—though, given the anachronistic nature of this book, anything’s possible. Take, for instance, a moment just a few pages in, when our seasoned and grown-up knight, settling into his yarn, recalls that the knight to whom he apprenticed as a young man began his tutelage with a nice cuppa. That’s all very well and good, except that tea was unknown in the Middle Ages; a stickler will tell you that it first turns up a century and a half after the events actor/novelist Hawke (Ash Wednesday, 2002, etc.) recounts. That’s either magical realism or sloppiness, both of which this latest effort abounds in. Take the nostrum that Good Sir Knight Senior imparts to Junior: “You are better than no one, and no one is better than you.” All very nicely egalitarian, that, but a bit out of step with the elaborate hierarchy of medieval equerry and nobility. And more: “The simple joys are the great ones. Pleasure is not complicated.” Tell it to Abelard and Heloise, oh Obi-Wan. Elsewhere Hawke merrily (and again anachronistically) stuffs in a well-known Buddhist tale, the punch line to which is, “I set that boy down hours ago, but I see you are still carrying him.” Ah, well. By all appearances, Hawke aspires to write a modern Siddhartha, but what we wind up with is more along the lines of watered-down Mitch Albom—and that’s a very weak cup of tea indeed.
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-96233-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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