This new version of Don Quixote is less an update of Cervantes than a comforting affirmation that our souls live on after we die.
It’s hard to write about this epic poem without mentioning its remarkable mode of composition. The poet who gets top billing is Ricardo K. Petrillo, but for all intents and purposes, the book’s author is his father, Claudio, as Ricardo passed away nearly a decade ago. According to the introduction, this volume is the seventh work that Ricardo has given to Claudio from beyond the grave. However, it’s less a story about a new knight errant than about why such transmissions are possible. The book’s hero is Joseph, an exceptional boy raised in New Mexico under the tutelage of a shaman. As Joseph grows up, he befriends Sancho, who will become his bosom companion, partner in crime and right-hand man. It takes no time at all for Joseph’s family and friends to recognize his intelligence, empathy, love, and desire for justice and peace. He takes these traits to medical school, where he learns that modern medicine neglects a crucial element: the human soul. Through study and meditation, Joseph comes to believe that our eternal souls exist apart from our bodies, and that we need to care for our spirits as well as our flesh. He takes this message into his medical practice and, later, into an unlikely political career. Author Martin Amis once remarked that Cervantes’ masterpiece’s only flaw is its unreadability. The same can’t be said of Petrillo’s update, which is thoroughly approachable and reads with admirable ease. Although it’s presented as poetry, it’s actually just prose dropped into unmetered quatrains, and at a few awkward moments, one wishes it would abandon the verse form and use simple sentences. For instance, when Joseph’s medical school professor advises him to “[s]tay without involvement / With the patients that come to you,” readers may wish that he’d just say, “Don’t get emotionally involved with your patients.” Also, aside from the sidekick Sancho, there isn’t much of Cervantes’ original to be found here. The Spanish hero’s famously mad windmill-tilting served to send up traditions of chivalric literature; by contrast, there’s nothing mad about Joseph at all: He’s the brilliant prophet of a new religion and a political savior. Overall, this work might have told Joseph’s story more effectively if it weren’t saddled with literary baggage.
An unexpected, poetic tale, in which the medium really is the message.
Pub Date: June 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494462642
Page Count: 326
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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