by Severo Perez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2019
An elegantly conceived tale—boasting a culturally and historically astute plot—that demands to be read.
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A tragic twist of fate leaves a revered artist destitute in Texas in this novel.
Seventy-year-old Cosimo Infante Cano was born in Cuba but forged a reputation as a modernist painter living and working in Paris. In 1961, he finds himself experiencing the same “nightmarish anxiety” he felt while fighting in the Great War as he wanders the streets of San Antonio with very little money. His plan was to make a passage from Europe to America to join his lover, Sara Hunter, whom he met in Paris and has known for 14 years. Yet, after his arrival in the United States, he discovers that his suitcases containing his “street clothes and address book” have been stolen. On reaching San Antonio, he then learns that Sara has been killed in a car accident. The wealthy Hunter family chooses to distance itself from him, making his situation even more precarious, as he had entrusted $45,000 to Sara to keep until his arrival along with two trunks packed with his clothes, tools, and brushes. Cosimo barely has the money to find himself a clean bed for the night, let alone the resources to sue the Hunters. Meanwhile, he faces a society where racial prejudice is commonplace. His appearance and bohemian attire mark him immediately as an outsider, or an “odd bird,” as one passerby remarks. Treated as a second-class citizen on account of his race and a vagrant because of his clothes, the city tries to prevent Cosimo from gaining a foothold, but the aging artist’s resilience may be underestimated. Cosimo’s struggle against the odds is absorbing from the get-go. Yet the manner in which Perez (Willa Brown, 2016, etc.) employs several layers of narrative, backtracking to detail the protagonist’s artistic life in ’40s Paris as well as alluding to the horrors he witnessed in World War I, adds richness and depth. The author diligently pins the main narrative to key political events of the era, most significantly the reluctant cessation of racial segregation in the South, which Ruthann Medlin, an openly bigoted San Antonio librarian, bemoans: “That was President Kennedy’s doing. Mixing all the races.” The compelling tale is driven predominantly by strong dialogue, with Perez capturing the sharpness and wit of bohemian cultural repartee, as when Sara playfully comments on a novel she has been translating: “The author’s characters are pale Edward Hopper creatures living in bleak hotel rooms. Having sex, not for pleasure mind you, but out of boredom. It’s as if they’re playing a winless game of tic-tac-toe.” The bond between Cosimo and Sara is also described in satisfyingly tender detail: “She reached out and took his hand, drawing him from the table to the settee. She found his slender fingers with nails trimmed into impeccable crescents particularly sensual.” There’s only one minor flaw: Because Cosimo is such a multifaceted, intricately drawn character, all the other players appear underdeveloped in comparison. Still, this does not detract from a captivating story that orchestrates a clever collision of artistic liberalism with the conservative values of the age.
An elegantly conceived tale—boasting a culturally and historically astute plot—that demands to be read.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87565-729-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Severo Perez
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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