A significant work of modern Latin American literature by a writer too little known.
Continuation of the late Argentine novelist and scholar’s revisitation of the country of his youth.
Happy years? Piglia’s (1940-2017) alter ego wades into the 1960s a touch less confused than in the predecessor volume, Formative Years (2017). He plans, carefully, meticulously, his budding career as a writer, worrying in one notebook entry about his chances for success: “And what if the best thing I have ever written, the best thing I will ever write in my life were these notes, these fragments, in which I record that I never manage to write the way I would like to?” But those notebook entries, telling stories within Piglia’s larger story, are more effective than a larger framing narrative might be, announcing themes and introducing characters who turn up at odd moments. One of those themes is Renzi’s constant self-scrutiny, which sometimes threatens to become circular: “I have recorded here a substantial though incomplete part of my daily activities,” Piglia writes, “which, due to those same occupations, I can’t always record in this diary.” A figure who pops up from time to time is the legendary writer Jorge Luis Borges, evoked in a story about a duel fought by two men near a drug store so that, according to Borges, “they could be treated”; getting off a bus, Renzi later spots Borges on a Buenos Aires street: “I see him passing and call his name, and he pauses a moment and smiles toward me.” While engaged with the likes of Lacan and Sartre, Renzi mostly confines his political engagement, in a time of rising authoritarianism, to making notebook sketches of cops-and-robbers stories and questioning “the autonomy of literature, or rather, the illusion of autonomy in literature"; his resistance is subtle, though real. One wonders whether the next volume, set in the time of the generals, will see more direct involvement with the world outside Renzi’s study.
A significant work of modern Latin American literature by a writer too little known.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63206-198-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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