An insouciantly witty celebration of the mingled folly and grandeur of physical love and its discontents. The best so far...
The Cuban-born author's fifth novel (and third in English translation, following In the Palm of Darkness, 19xx, and The Messenger, 19xx) depicts in profuse erotic detail the temptations to which a middle-aged married couple separately succumb during a Caribbean vacation voyage.
Fernando, a seemingly stodgy accountant, and his lively (slightly older) wife Celia journey around the islands, en route to Martinique, in the wake of their only daughter's marriage and their own aroused awareness of time passing—and mortality. He dallies with a sultry fellow passenger, Julieta (amusingly enough, she says she's a harpist), while indulging rather less celestial memories of his many happy couplings with Celia, as well as the occasional past infidelity. Celia, meanwhile, remembers her own satisfying sexual career (Fernando doesn't know she has carried on an extended affair with her importunate lover Agustin) and enjoys a fling with a remarkably endowed black boatman. Meanwhile, the seductive rhythms of the bolero are continually heard in the novel's background, and further counterpoint is provided by a series of letters addressed to an unidentified `Angela` by her lover `Abel.` The mystery of their correspondence, and its connection to the relationship of Fernando and Celia, is deftly revealed in the complex denouement—which also explains the enigmatic Julieta's true nature. Montero also deepens the story’s agreeably bizarre texture with frequently hilarious comparisons of the varieties of human sexual response to the mating rituals of numerous other lovestruck creatures (informing us, for example, that `the curved claws of . . . male owls are out of control during coitus, they leave the soft backs of their mates permanently bent`).
An insouciantly witty celebration of the mingled folly and grandeur of physical love and its discontents. The best so far from one of Latin America's most impressive recent exports.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-095290-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.
After a year in a coma, Annie Rush wakes up to a world without her husband, the TV she developed, and a wealth of memories that put her life into context, but as her body and mind heal, she puts her faith in second chances.
As a successful cooking-show producer who’s married to the gorgeous star, Annie knows she’s lucky, so she overlooks the occasional arguments and her husband’s penchant for eclipsing her. She’s especially excited the day she finds out she’s pregnant and, ignoring her typical steadfast schedule, rushes to the set to tell him. And discovers him making love to his onscreen assistant. Stunned, Annie leaves, trying to figure out her next move, and is struck on the head by falling on-set machinery. She wakes a year later in her Vermont hometown, as weak as a kitten and suffering from amnesia. As the days pass, however, she finds clues and markers regarding her life, and many of her memories begin to fill in. She remembers Fletcher, the first boy she loved, and how their timing was always off. She wanted to leave her family’s maple farm behind and explore the world—especially once her cooking-themed film school project was discovered and she was enfolded into the LA world of a successful food show. Fletcher intended to follow her, until life created big roadblocks for their relationship that they could never manage to overcome. Now, however, Annie’s husband has divorced her while Fletcher has settled in Switchback, and just as things look like they may finally click for Fletcher and Annie, her pre-accident life comes calling again. Wiggs (Starlight on Willow Lake, 2015, etc.) examines one woman’s journey into losing everything and then winning it all back through rediscovering her passions and being true to herself, tackling a complicated dual storyline with her typical blend of authenticity and sensitivity.
A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242543-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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