A stylish, jampacked tale that examines love, memory, and international identity.
A professor of Japanese history searches for a long-lost lover while studying the Portuguese diaspora throughout Asia.
Reyes-Ruiz (La Forma de las Cosas, 2016, etc.) crams a wide range of topics into a novel that follows Tomás Rodrigues, a professor at a Roman Catholic university in Tokyo, as he untangles three plotlines: the sudden reappearance of a girlfriend from his youth, a mysterious old text about the adventures of a 16th-century Portuguese man, and anxieties about his academic career. The enigmatic former lover, Monica Klaseen, is the most intriguing of the three threads, and Rodrigues’ search for her becomes the engine that drives the tale forward. After seeing a woman who looks like Klaseen in the airport, the professor faints and forgets the encounter, but is suddenly haunted by strange dreams and recollections of a woman he hasn’t thought about for more than 20 years. When he returns to Japan for the start of the new school year, he is unable to forget Klaseen, even though he has to navigate departmental politics, a new research project, and his relationship with his ex-wife. That’s a lot of content for a relatively slim 175 pages, but there are essentially two major themes. The first focuses on the difficulty of finding a sense of home in an international world. Rodrigues is a Portuguese-Colombian with Australian citizenship teaching in Japan, battling the stigma against foreigners while investigating the origins of that bias through research. The second delves into the inconsistency of memory and history; Rodrigues constantly struggles to separate truth and falsehood as he parses the imperial past and his own experiences. In addressing this latter point, the novel occasionally trips over itself. Rodrigues’ bout of short-term amnesia at the book’s outset is a curious episode that ultimately feels unnecessary. Stylistically, Reyes-Ruiz’s subject matter and prose evoke a number of comparisons: Haruki Murakami’s ambiguous atmosphere, the virile professor narratives of Philip Roth, and the post-colonial preoccupations of Amitav Ghosh. Fans of any of these authors should find something to like here, but the book may prove especially appealing to anyone looking to learn about an underappreciated dimension of the colonial experience, the Portuguese exploration of Asia.
A stylish, jampacked tale that examines love, memory, and international identity.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-891270-26-0
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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