A sharp account, suspenseful and nicely paced, that benefits from the unusual perspectives of innocent bystanders in this...
An odd-couple romance, in the tradition of Kiss of the Spider Woman or The Crying Game, between a Marxist revolutionary and drag queen.
The American debut of Chilean activist and writer Lemebel begins in 1986, after 13 years of military dictatorship in Chile. Underground groups of revolutionary terrorists have been wreaking havoc across the country with alarming regularity, causing blackouts in the cities and assassinations in the provinces, and the authorities respond with predictable brutality. During times as troubled as these, even someone as politically ignorant as the Queen of the Corner, a transvestite living in the back streets of Santiago’s teeming slums, can become a player—although not by her own choice. The Queen has the misfortune to meet and fall for Carlos, a handsome young revolutionary, and is innocent enough to offer him the use of her home. Soon Carlos is dropping off large parcels for safekeeping and bringing friends over for late-night meetings on short notice. The smitten Queen doesn’t mind that these packages contain weird devices that look like torpedoes, or that Carlos’s study groups never seem to discuss books or classes. Her story unfolds alongside that of Gonzalo, another gay Chilean, who serves as hairdresser to Pinochet’s wife. Gonzalo is about as politically informed as the Queen—he thinks, for example, that the General would be much better liked by revolutionaries if he changed the color of his uniforms—but he is able to see the regime’s growing desperation from the inside. A collision will come somewhere down the road, obviously, but who will be the victim, Carlos or the General? Or will more innocent parties, like Gonzalo or the Queen, pay the price?
A sharp account, suspenseful and nicely paced, that benefits from the unusual perspectives of innocent bystanders in this dirty game.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1768-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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