Disappointing and often just kind of gross.
A postmodern fable by the award-winning author of Mary Coin (2013) and The God of War (2008).
A childless couple longs for a baby…. This desire launches a thousand fairy tales, including “Thumbelina,” which Silver slyly invokes at the beginning of her new novel. As the elderly Agáta Janacek struggles through labor, the midwife encourages her to think of a flower blooming—an echo of the tulip from which Hans Christian Andersen’s diminutive heroine emerges. But, just as childbirth is not the gentle opening of a flower, the baby Pavla is not a perfectly formed little sprite. She’s a dwarf, all big head and foreshortened limbs. These opening scenes reveal a lot about the story to come. First, that the author is using tropes from fairy tales and folklore in a realist mode. Second, that the novel's brand of realism relies heavily on graphic depictions of human bodies and their various products. There are pendulous breasts, flaccid penises, and Agáta’s pubis with its sparse graying hair. There’s also quite a bit of sweat, mucus, and ordure. Pavla, as befits a fairy-tale heroine, is beautiful—but only sometimes. As her story progresses, she will undergo several transformations, only some of which make sense. Of course a girl being raped might turn into a wolf. But why would a dwarf stretched on a rack turn into a girl with a beautiful body and a canine face? It might seem ridiculous to argue with fantasy, but fairy tales do have their own logic, and Silver doesn’t quite seem to grasp that internal consistency is a large part of the fairy tale’s appeal, nor does she seem to appreciate how fairy-tale heroes and heroines function. Because they are types rather than real people, they allow us to project our own desires upon them. Pavla is real enough to forestall this operation but not real enough to be satisfying.
Disappointing and often just kind of gross.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16792-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
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
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