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HUMAN MATTER

Name: HUMAN MATTER
Author: Rodrigo Rey Rosa
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1646-7

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa ; translated by Eduardo Aparicio ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2019

Of a piece with the author’s Dust on Her Tongue (1992) as an exploration of political violence and its troubling...

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Somber, allusive story of his native country’s troubled past by Guatemalan exile Rey Rosa (Chaos: A Fable, 2019, etc.).

The human matter of the title is not just corporeal, although the events Rey Rosa recounts in this slender novel have yielded mounds of corpses. It also includes the faint traces of those who were “disappeared” at the hands of the National Police, a body theoretically disbanded after peace accords were signed between the government and its guerrilla discontents in 1996. Among the names and facts that fill the narrator’s notebooks are a man arrested in 1941, well before such events began, for “recidivist loitering,” another for “shining boots without a license.” The police were there, always, to remove such miscreants from the streets, to say nothing of errant typists, drill operators, sawyers, and others who crossed the line. As he digs, the narrator asks questions of people who were affected by the repression of the regime and the guerrilla war alike; of one professor who narrowly escaped torture for his “subversive activities,” the narrator asks how it could be that the mostly illiterate Mayan peasants of the countryside could be assumed “to share the Marxist ideology of the revolutionary leaders,” a question that the professor finds “extremely unfriendly.” The archives themselves are unfriendly to researchers, as the narrator finds when volumes are brought to him with pages torn out, as if to hide the worst of the worst happenings from history. Secrecy lies at the heart of the story, manifesting itself in many ways, as when the narrator is asked to write about newly published diaries of the Argentinian writer Bioy Casares that Bioy himself never intended for publication. Rey Rosa is suggestive rather than explicit, his narrator slowly despairing of ever finding the truth: When asked who his story is intended for, he finally replies, “maybe it’s just for me."

Of a piece with the author’s Dust on Her Tongue (1992) as an exploration of political violence and its troubling reverberations.

Pub Date: June 18, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4773-1646-7

Page Count: 182

Publisher: Univ. of Texas

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE COUNTRY OF TOÓ
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa ; translated by Stephen Henighan

- BOOK REVIEW
CHAOS, A FABLE
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa ; translated by Jeffrey Gray

- BOOK REVIEW
DUST ON HER TONGUE
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.