Terry (My Father’s Hands, 1992, etc.) scores gently with a sweet parable that almost sneaks by as simple realism.
Forget Scrooge: here’s a man whose brush with mortality becomes the vehicle for a short, sweet tour through his life’s dramas and his own ordinariness—only for him to find he was a sweet guy all along.
Are you a writer needing an excuse to write lots of funny, highbrow penis jokes? How about prostate cancer? Creative Writing Professor Stanley Morris has two problems: (1) he has two first names and not even his colleagues seem able to remember that Morris isn’t what they should be calling him, and (2) a new doctor has felt something while sticking his finger up you know where. It’s cancer, which Stanley decides to have removed, and so the journey begins: first, the haze of anesthesia and nostalgia allows for a trip back in time to visit Stanley’s two brothers, one of them a suicide; next, the present is revealed as Stanley recovers, returns to work, and discovers his worth at the small university that is about to be turned upside down by another death that is, surprisingly, not Stanley’s; and, finally, the future becomes known through e-mail and a new female dean. At the close, Stanley doesn’t confront his grave but instead gains a new comfort with his own insignificance, this via a beehive in his house that was there before he bought it and will be there long after he has gone. The story pleases in its seeming effortlessness, the simple names of the various academics are worthwhile jokes, and Stanley’s inner self is worthy of one limned by a Bellow or a nicer Phillip Roth.
Terry (My Father’s Hands, 1992, etc.) scores gently with a sweet parable that almost sneaks by as simple realism.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-87074-463-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A strong, absorbing Chilean family chronicle, plushly upholstered—with mystical undercurrents (psychic phenomena) and a measure of leftward political commitment. (The author is a cousin of ex-Pres. Salvador Allende, an ill-fated socialist.) The Truebas are estate-owners of independent wealth, of whom only one—the eventual patriarch, Esteban—fully plays his class role. Headstrong and conservative, Esteban is a piggish youth, mistreating his peons and casually raping his girl servants . . . until he falls under the spell of young Clara DelValle: mute for nine years after witnessing the gruesome autopsy of her equally delicate sister, Clara is capable of telekinesis and soothsaying; she's a pure creature of the upper realms who has somehow dropped into crude daily life. So, with opposites attracting, the marriage of Esteban and Clara is inevitable—as is the succession of Clara-influenced children and grandchildren. Daughter Blanca ignores Class barriers to fall in love with—and bear a child by—the foreman's son, who will later become a famous leftwing troubadour (on the model of Victor Jara). Twin boys Jaime and Nicholas head off in different directions—one growing up to become a committed physician, the other a mystic/entrepreneur. And Alba, the last clairvoyant female of the lineage, will end the novel in a concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. Allende handles the theosophical elements here matter-of-factly: the paranormal powers of the Trueba women have to be taken more or less on faith. (Veteran readers of Latin American fiction have come to expect mysticism as part of the territory.) And the political sweep sometimes seems excessively insistent or obtrusive: even old Esteban recants from his reactionary ways at the end, when they seem to destroy his family. ("Thus the months went by, and it became clear to everyone, even Senator Trueba, that the military had seized power to keep it for themselves and not hand the country over to the politicians of the right who made the coup possible.") But there's a comfortable, appealing professionalism to Allende's narration, slowly turning the years through the Truebas' passions and secrets and fidelities. She doesn't rush; the characters are clear and sharp; there's style here but nothing self-conscious or pretentious. So, even if this saga isn't really much deeper than the Belva Plain variety, it's uncommonly satisfying—with sturdy, old-fashioned storytelling and a fine array of exotic, historical shadings.
Pub Date: May 23, 1985
ISBN: 0553383809
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985
BOOK TO SCREEN
APPRECIATIONS
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party. The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising. But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party. Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.Pub Date: June 13, 1949
ISBN: 0452284236
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1949
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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