Who has the patience for a hero this cloying and self-important, or for plot turns this clunky?
Stolen art, Nazi collaborators in WWII rural France and a larger-than-life guitar-twanging American named Coyote add up to no more than lukewarm melodrama in British romance novelist Montefiore’s second to appear in the U.S. (after Last Voyage of the Valentina, 2006).
In 1985, Manhattan antiques-dealer Misha is shocked to discover that his beloved dying mother, Anouk, possesses a Titian masterpiece when she tries to donate it to the Met, which cannot authenticate the painting’s rightful owner. When Misha’s stepfather Coyote, who abandoned Misha and Anouk 30 years earlier, shows up, Misha turns the aging homeless man away. Immediately full of questions and regret, Misha then sets out to solve the mystery of the painting and to uncover the truth about his own history. He returns to the village in Bordeaux that he and Anouk left when Misha was seven. Until the war, Anouk had been the nanny at a privately owned winery/estate. After the war, the villagers denounced Anouk as a traitor for marrying Misha’s father, a German officer. Witnessing her brutal humiliation caused Misha to become mute. Anouk continued to work at the estate, now a hotel, until the handsome American Coyote arrived. While Anouk and Coyote fell in love, his affectionate attention gave Misha back his voice. Coyote brought them to New Jersey, where they lived happily until Coyote disappeared. In Bordeaux, Misha learns that, despite appearances, both his mother and father were anti-Nazis and that Coyote had not abandoned Misha and Anouk; he’d been in prison for murder. A mama’s boy who has never connected intimately with any other woman despite numerous gratuitous, uninspired sex scenes, Misha finds true love with Claudine, whom he first loved when he was six and who now leaves her husband to return with Misha to America. The million-dollar painting becomes largely irrelevant.
Who has the patience for a hero this cloying and self-important, or for plot turns this clunky?Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-7889-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A bloated, pointless-seeming prequel to 1985's bestselling Lonesome Dove. In his fourth book in three years, McMurtry (most recently, The Late Child, p. 417) introduces us to future heroes Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae—here, green Texas Rangers who've rashly signed on before age 20, seeking adventure in the wilds of western Texas. On their first mission, an ill-fated attempt to find a safe passage from San Antonio to El Paso, the two come face-to-face with Buffalo Hump, the fierce Comanche chief who almost single-handedly wipes out the whole Ranger troop. Adventure number two is equally doomed—an attempted assault on the far-away Mexican stronghold of Santa Fe. Before they even get to New Mexico, though, Call and Gus must endure the bleak elements, more of Buffalo Hump's abuse, the brutality of the Apaches, and finally the might of the well-trained Mexican Army. While the Rangers are being decimated, the reader is assured of the two heroes' survival. And since the rest of the Rangers are stock B-movie characters—the mournful black cook, the sullen mountain man, the prostitute with a heart of gold—there's little reason to be engaged by them. Overall, the novel's a series of mostly predictable encounters, with no underlying theme or emotional weight, whose best characters—English prisoners stuck in an El Paso leper colony—don't appear until the very end, and then only as an afterthought. In fact, the is seems so slipshoddily produced as to seem unedited, filled with continuity gaps and leaps of fictional faith, not to mention endless scenes, improbable dialogue, and countless leaden sentences: "Gus didn't seem to be particularly concerned about the prospect of Comanche capture—his nonchalant approach to life could be irksome in times of conflict." Only for blindly faithful McMurtry fans.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80753-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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