Quite a valuable history lesson, despite its stock types.
A nine-year-old boy wanders through war-torn El Salvador, trying to find his mother and stay out of the line of fire, in this lucid but limited tale.
Benítez (Bitter Grounds, 1997, etc.) sets her third novel in the six-week period between two recent cataclysms of Salvadoran history: the March 1980 funeral of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, at which 35 mourners were killed; and the military’s massacre of 600 fleeing peasants on the Honduran border. Although her protagonist, Nicolás de la Virgen Veras, lives in the countryside with his grandfather, he goes to San Salvador to join his mother at “the funeral of a martyred saint.” When violence breaks out at the cathedral, Nicolás’s mother is killed by a bullet. Separated from her body by chaotic circumstances, the boy thinks she’s still alive, but he doesn’t have the address of the house where she was a servant. So he journeys back to his rural village, only to find it abandoned and devastated by bombings. As he roams about, Nicolás meets both leftist guerrillas and right-wing army soldiers—all of whom say exactly what you’d expect—and comes to understand the tragedy of being caught in the middle. As Benítez notes, “While the two sides fought for their principles, most of the dying was done by the people.” Contrasting with the novel’s usual plainspoken realism are the occasional manifestations of the Virgin Mary, who gives guidance and reassurance to Nicolás during his most harrowing moments. Such scenes—when, for example, a statuette of the Virgin actually speaks to the little boy—are authentically weird and sometimes a bit mawkish. But they don’t distract from Benítez’s vivid portrait of a time and place in which even children are murdered without second thought.
Quite a valuable history lesson, despite its stock types.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6399-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poortimes—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everything away, and her death in a well; for Joe, the hand of the "wild" woman, his mother, that never really found his. And all of the child Dorcas's dolls burned up with her mother and her childhood. Truly, the new music of Harlem—from clicks and taps of pleasure to the thud of betrayed marching black veterans with their frozen faces—"had a complicated anger in it." Were Joe and Violet substitutes for each other, for a need known and unmet? At the close, a new link is forged between them with another Dorcas. One of Morrison's richest novels yet, with its weave of city voices, tough and tender, public and private, and a flight of images that sweep up the world in a heartbeat: the narrator (never identified) contemplates airships in a city sky as they "swim below cloud foam...like watching a private dream....That was what [Dorcas's] hunger was like: mesmerizing, directed, floating like a public secret." In all, a lovely novel—lyrical, searching, and touching.
Pub Date: April 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41167-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Backman plays the story for both cynicism and hope, and his skill makes both hard, but not impossible, to resist.
Shockwaves from the incidents in Beartown (2017) shake an economically depressed hockey town in this latest from the author of A Man Called Ove.
Swedish novelist Backman loves an aphorism and is very good at them; evident in all his novels is an apparent ability to state a truth about humanity with breathtaking elegance. Often, he uses this same elegance to slyly misdirect his readers. Sometimes he overreaches and words that sound pretty together don’t hold up to scrutiny. This novel has a plethora of all three. Grim in tone, it features an overstocked cast of characters, all of whom are struggling for self-definition. Each has previously been shaped by the local hockey club, but that club is now being defunded and resources reallocated to the club of a rival town. Some Beartown athletes follow, some don’t. Lines are drawn in the sand. Several characters get played by a Machiavellian local politician who gets the club reinstated. Nearly all make poor decisions, rolling the town closer and closer to tragedy. Backman wants readers to know that things are complicated. Sure, many of Beartown’s residents are bigots and bullies. But some are generous and selfless. Actually, the bigots and bullies are also generous and selfless, in certain circumstances. And Lord knows they’ve all had a rough time of it. The important thing to remember is that hockey is pure. Except when it inspires violence. This is an interesting tactic for a novel in our cultural moment of sensitivity, and it can feel cumbersome. “When guys are scared of the dark they’re scared of ghosts and monsters,” he writes. “But when girls are scared of the dark they’re scared of guys.” Margaret Atwood said it better and with more authority decades ago.
Backman plays the story for both cynicism and hope, and his skill makes both hard, but not impossible, to resist.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6079-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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