An imaginative work that brings Cuban-American history to life.
Los Angeles resident Kushner’s first novel follows the lives of American ex-pats and others in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
In 1950s Cuba, employees of the vast, powerful United Fruit Company enjoy luxuries galore in their exclusive island communities while poverty and unrest stirs around them. Growing up on United Fruit property, Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites alternately share the stories of their strange, privileged lives. Through the children’s eyes, the social morays, recklessness and fears of the adults are revealed. While the children relay their upbringing in the Oriente Province, an exotic dancer, Rachel K, casts a spell on politicians and rebels alike in a nightclub in Havana. The mysterious Rachel K and one of her patrons, a French traitor, become deeply involved in the growing revolution, which leads them down an accelerating path toward a new and different future. Castro’s coup serves as a riveting backdrop and famous figures, like Fidel and his brother Raúl, populate the narrative. When the revolution reaches the gates of the American community, Everly and K.C. glimpse the world outside their secluded utopia, even as their socialite parents hold fast to their ignorance. The danger and violence of revolution engross Rachel K and the Frenchman, both of whom lack for a homeland, and they seem to thrive off the conflict. For the Americans, this harsh new backlash eventually shatters their previously tranquil lives, and the home they never truly possessed is seized in a flurry of patrimony. Soundly researched and gorgeously written, the creative story also serves as a history lesson.
An imaginative work that brings Cuban-American history to life.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6103-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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SEEN & HEARD
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