Latin American noir at its best—and further evidence of Piglia’s remarkable versatility and skill.
The Argentinean author of Artificial Respiration (1994) and The Absent City (2000) brilliantly re-creates a notorious, real-life 1965 Buenos Aires bank robbery and its aftermath.
Piglia’s semidocumentary structure embraces both the aforementioned event and its perpetrators, their associates, and victims. A tense opening sequence introduces the “twins” (devoid of family connection or physical resemblance): “Gaucho” Dorda (“The born criminal, the man who had been ruined since boyhood”) and Franco “Kid” Brignone, a cunning, soulless spoiled angel. The two are sometime homosexual lovers. Then we encounter their “mad” boss Malito, drug-addled “Twisty” Bazan, sexual athlete “Crow” Mereles, and their “organizer” (Her)Nando Heguilen (who supervises contacts—for example, with colluding police who’ll share the take). The violent robbery itself (committed during a payroll transfer), the gang’s flight to Montevideo (en route to Paraguay), and the lengthy “siege” and bloodbath that ensue are quite vividly narrated, and also intriguingly punctuated by the testimony and thoughts of various witnesses, corrupt Buenos Aires police commissioner Silva, and such briefly though crucially involved characters as police wireless operator Roque Perez. Further levels of both interest and irony are added by the thieves’ insistence that they are honorable revolutionaries (“We’re Peronist activists, exiles, fighting for the General’s [i.e., exiled dictator Juan Peron’s] return”) and by the public outcry created when gang members trapped in a surrounded hotel defiantly burn their loot, showering the siege’s observers with flaming banknotes. And Piglia uses flashbacks with equal dexterity, illuminating his self-doomed protagonists’ twisted beginnings (the account of Dorda’s horrific childhood is particularly potent) and their subsequent paths to petty crime, prison, and their violent ends. Money to Burn inspired the recent prizewinning film Plata Quemada; in fact, it reads like an Argentinean Asphalt Jungle.
Latin American noir at its best—and further evidence of Piglia’s remarkable versatility and skill.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-86207-592-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Granta
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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