A strong debut written with nuance and authority.
Debut author Cardenas explores youthful idealism, friendship, and the legacy of corruption in this novel set in Ecuador.
Leopoldo Hurtado calls his childhood friend Antonio in California and persuades him to return home to Ecuador after a 10-year absence. As classmates at the elite San Javier school, they'd believed themselves responsible for the country's future. Influenced by a radical priest who demanded "How are we to be Christians in a world of destitution and injustice?" they catechized the poor and visited the dying. But corruption and instability abound, and the immoral lifestyle of their rich classmate Julio holds an undeniable appeal. Antonio displays a weakness for expensive clothes he can't afford, leading to rumors at Stanford that he's a dictator's son. Will Leopoldo and Antonio run for office, saving Ecuador from corrupt oligarchs? Or will despair, and their own moral failings, prove too great? Connecting threads follow their poor former classmate Rolando who now runs a radio show, his girlfriend, Eva, and his sister, Alma, who embarks on a harrowing journey to the U.S. after Julio attempts to rape her. Cardenas leavens his material with sly humor and references to everything from Neruda and Julio Cortazar to ABBA and The Exorcist. The friends play a made-up game called Who's Most Pedantic? Leopoldo wonders if the Jesuits built rooms with high ceilings "so that when the time came for the old and the infirm to die the priests could direct them to the vast pointlessness of the lord above?" A statue of the Christ child weeps real tears. Writing sometimes in sentences that stretch for pages, sometimes in fragmented stream-of-consciousness, even briefly in Spanish, Cardenas displays an ambitious intelligence that eschews easy answers. His inclusive sympathy is balanced by an unsparing eye. By the end, Antonio questions his own motives for returning, asking himself "how are we to be humans in a world of destitution and injustice."
A strong debut written with nuance and authority.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56689-446-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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