A smart, controlled debut from a writer who addresses poverty and criminality in a variety of registers.
A set of linked stories spotlighting the ironies and precarity of life in rural Guatemala.
Fuentes’ first book in English is slim but potent, focused on poor farmers and their struggles to get by amid threats from wealthier and better-armed interlopers. Central among them is Don Henrik, a well-traveled plantation owner who’s trying to improve his standing: In the opening title story, he starts farming rainbow trout, a project that proves surprisingly challenging for the narrator, a farmhand whose affair distracts him from his task of keeping the fish alive. The metaphors aren’t subtle (invasive species, emotional and environmental sustainability, etc.), but Fuentes (via Jones’ crisp translation) delivers the story with a Carver-esque bluntness. In “Dive,” Henrik recalls his addict brother, Mati, and a foolhardy act of his while snorkeling, which makes for a taut set piece about the way one family member’s questionable behavior radiates outward. In the closing story, “Henrik,” the title character risks being forced to give up his land, as a group of thugs' gentle suggestions morph into more terrifying high-pressure extortion tactics. The tone in the stories isn’t strictly foreboding: “Out of the Blue, Perla” features a cow raised to behave like a dog, including walking on its hind legs, baffling some gunmen; the mood of growing threat is undercut by a note of absurdity. And in the tender, atmospheric “Whisky,” Mati is in recovery and raising a family, kept company by a dog whose disappearance has an unexpectedly deep impact. Still, something dark always lurks just around a turn in these stories, and though Fuentes tends to avoid describing violence itself, he harrowingly captures how the threat of it intensifies and deepens. His climaxes are the moments when, as one character puts it, “the wolves take off their sheep’s clothing.”
A smart, controlled debut from a writer who addresses poverty and criminality in a variety of registers.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9164-6561-9
Page Count: 97
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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