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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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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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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.