Not quite as thought-provoking as the author’s debut novel, but more fun—in a kinky sort of way. An intriguing sophomore...
Another offbeat adventure from Cokal (Mirabilis, 2001), who sends a consumptive but dauntless Danish teenager across 1880s America in search of her lover.
Abandoned in infancy and raised by nuns, Famke acquires little from the convent beside tuberculosis and a well-deserved reputation as a wild child. When the devoted Sister Birgit finds her work on a farm, she prefers to run off to Copenhagen with an English painter and enjoy life as his model/mistress. Albert is as mediocre in bed as he is at the easel, but Famke is nonetheless heartbroken when he goes home to pursue artistic fame. After she learns he’s moved on to the States, Famke pretends to convert to Mormonism so that an American missionary will finance her passage there. She’s even willing to become Heber Goodhouse’s polygamous third wife, since he’ll take her to Utah and she’s read that Albert is heading west. Coughing all the way, often wearing men’s clothes, she follows Albert’s trail from whorehouse to whorehouse in Colorado, financing her travels by reworking his paintings of the establishments’ employees to reflect changes in personnel. She finally ends up in California at the Hygeia Springs Institute for Phthisis. Its wealthy founder Edouard promises to cure her TB through electrical treatments that certainly are pleasurable (think: giant vibrator) but do not assuage Famke’s longing for Albert. The lovers are finally reunited at San Francisco’s Thalia Festival House, where Famke is one of the “Living Waxworks” that enable the promoter to show near-naked women without getting arrested. The humor here is very dark, the descriptions of bodily afflictions baroque: Don’t expect a happy ending. But Cokal gives her swashbuckling heroine a spectacular send-off appropriate to her portrait of 19th-century America as a brutal but oddly liberating society, and the well-rendered secondary characters achieve slightly more satisfying ends.
Not quite as thought-provoking as the author’s debut novel, but more fun—in a kinky sort of way. An intriguing sophomore effort from a writer who definitely has her own unique voice.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-932961-06-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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