A delightful artifact that will leave readers wondering if they ever truly understood the world at all.
Eleven short stories from the weirder end of South American culture.
Best known for his posthumously published work The Luminous Novel (2021), this collection by Levrero (1940-2004) resurrects his earliest fiction, most with shades of paranoia and self-consciousness that would turn Philip K. Dick green. The opener already gives off a strong “Tell-Tale Heart” vibe, as one man’s checklist of his nightly bedtime rituals descends into disaster—and that’s the cheerier of the two stories that bookend the collection (“The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine” and “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (Negative)”), both concerning a machine that seems to offer a self-destructive feedback loop instead of white noise. Even a casual action like igniting a lighter becomes a labyrinthine quest for salvation in “Beggar Street,” while brevities like “One-Way Story No. 2” use a mere handful of words to examine existential truths. There is some humor here, albeit very dark. “The Stiff Corpse” offers Pythonesque absurdity, while seemingly innocuous items become instruments of destruction in “Jelly” (a take on The Blob by way of Latin American surrealism) and in “That Green Liquid,” which shows a home product demonstration going Cat in the Hat–grade awry. The only notion that’s overused is the haunted house motif that marks “The Abandoned House,” full of tiny men and spiders and unicorns and whatnot, and the locked-room-mystery that morphs into a hero’s quest in “The Basement.” Similarly, insomnia and obsession grip the protagonists of “The Golden Reflections” and “The Boarding House,” where nocturnal wanderings lead men astray. Most of the collection’s protagonists are unnamed gray men whose featurelessness sharpens the bizarre elements of each tale. They often seem adrift, navigating a slow descent into mediocrity that makes their encounters with the surreal, and the dichotomy between their worldviews and Levrero’s phantasmagorical imagination, delightfully jarring.
A delightful artifact that will leave readers wondering if they ever truly understood the world at all.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781916751064
Page Count: 176
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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