An attempt at artful satire that gets lost in translation.
Two men discover they share more than just a name in this Belgian bestseller from Flemish author Lanoye (Speechless, 2018).
When the book opens, Tony Hanssen—a 42-year-old former cruise director–turned–reluctant gigolo—is squiring the wife of Chinese tycoon Mr. Bo Xiang around Buenos Aires. Tony hopes to charm Mrs. Bo Xiang into convincing her notoriously ruthless husband to forgive his gambling debts. Unfortunately, the elderly woman suffers a fatal heart attack in flagrante delicto, sending a panicked Tony scrambling. Meanwhile, at a South African game reserve, a different Tony Hanssen—this one a 40-year-old computer programmer who engineered a now-bankrupt investment firm’s high-tech Ponzi scheme—is poised to shoot a protected rhinoceros. Tony plans to sell the creature’s horns and use the money to regain his family, rehabilitate his reputation, and resume his opulent lifestyle, but another poacher beats him to the kill, forcing him to improvise. Events ultimately conspire to place both men at the same Guangzhou hotel, where a case of mistaken identity entwines their fates. Lanoye’s weird and woolly tale gleefully lampoons the wantonness of capitalism and the destructive nature of greed. Evocative prose conjures lurid imagery, intensifying reader revulsion for the equally contemptible Tonys, who are but interchangeable cogs in a global machine. Regrettably, muddy plotting and momentum-sapping monologues plague the last two-thirds of the story, blunting its impact and depleting its narrative drive.
An attempt at artful satire that gets lost in translation.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-046-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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