Steeped in Filipino history and culture, Joaquin's work is a welcome discovery.
A collection of short stories and a play by Joaquin (1917-2004), one of the Philippines’ leading writers in English, who finds passion and melodrama in the nation’s colonial and Catholic history.
The first story, “Three Generations,” tells of a young man who defies his father first by choosing the priesthood over a law career and then by reuniting his pining grandfather with a young woman. It hints at the “tropical gothic” of the title but is more conventional than most of the collection. Ghosts, saints, and visions are common as Joaquin (Gotita de Dragon and Other Stories, 2014, etc.) moves among folklore, legend, and even some sci-fi. In “Cándido’s Apocalypse,” a teenage boy alienated from his family and life in general begins to see people without clothing and then without flesh. In an entertaining quasi-mystery that begins with a crucial toothbrush (“The Order of Melkizedek”), siblings’ efforts to rescue their sister from a cult center on a Rasputin-like figure who reappears over many centuries. In “The Summer Solstice,” a religious festival’s wild dancing turns one woman into a sort of a pagan queen in her husband’s bemused eyes. One of the two navels may not exist in the tortuous, episodic title story as it shifts between Hong Kong and Manila and touches on exile, failed revolution, WWII, and Filipinos’ uncommon musical gifts. The play that closes the collection (“A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino”) shows two spinster sisters trying to hold on to a once-vibrant and grand old house. Their survival may depend on selling their father’s final work of art, a painting of Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, from the ruins of Troy. The drama is rich in themes but rather dreary and heavy-handed.
Steeped in Filipino history and culture, Joaquin's work is a welcome discovery.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313071-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.
Rome, past and present, serves as the setting for a sparkling historical novel.
Smith (Free Men, 2016, etc.) bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love. Tom, a biologist working in contemporary Rome, is studying ostracods, tiny crustaceans that thrive in polluted, agitated environments. “Are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse?” Tom asks, aware that his question about ostracods could just as well apply to his own emotional agitation. The married father of a 9-year-old daughter, he has met a young woman who enchants him, impelling him to confront his desperate desire for “an unleashing” and for a love deeper than what he feels for his wife. A child playing in the water where he is investigating suddenly shrieks in pain, pierced by a piece of bent metal, “scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust.” It is a fishhook—maybe a castoff with no value or perhaps an ancient relic: uncanny, miraculous. The fishhook reappears as Smith leaps back to the Renaissance, where it falls into the hands of Giulia, a mixed-race princess newly married to a Medici, pregnant with another man’s child. For Giulia, her fortunes embroiled in political and religious rivalries, the fishhook evokes a holier time, before corruption and hypocrisy sullied the church. In ninth-century Rome, Felix, a 60-year-old monk, is tormented by his youthful, forbidden love for Tomaso; assigned to watch over the decaying bodies in the putridarium, Felix comes into possession of the fishhook, guessing—wishing—that it belonged to the martyred St. Prisca, who perhaps “got it direct from Jesus.” In the year 165, Prisca did indeed find the hook, secreting it as a precious token. Drawn to worshipping Christ rather than pagan gods, 12-year-old Prisca stands defiant against her violent tormenters. Perhaps Smith’s most appealing character is Satan, whose weary, ironic comments punctuate a narrative that shines with lyrical, translucent prose.
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287364-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels,...
A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact.
Music publisher Hicks treats a long-overlooked episode of the war in this account of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., which took place in November 1864 near Nashville. As a field hospital is pitched in her field, Carrie McGavock, an iron-spined farm woman and upstanding citizen of the town, takes it upon herself to tend after the Confederate wounded; later, she and her husband will rebury 1,500 of the fallen on their property. Hicks centers much of the story on Carrie, who has seen her own children die of illness and who has endurance in her blood. “I was not a morbid woman,” Carrie allows, “but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me, or leave me alone.” Other figures speak their turn. One is a young Union officer amazed at the brutal and sometimes weird tableaux that unfold before him; as the bullets fly, he pauses before a 12-year-old rebel boy suffocating under the weight of his piled-up dead comrades. “Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility,” young Lt. Stiles sighs. Another is an Arkansas soldier taken prisoner by the Yankees: “I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I’d picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks.” Yet another is Nathan Forrest, who would strike fear in many a heart as a Confederate cavalryman, and later as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Hicks renders each of these figures with much attention to historical detail and a refreshing lack of genre cliché, closing with a subtle lament for the destruction of history before the bulldozer: “One longs to know that some things don’t change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination.”
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-50012-7
Page Count: 404
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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