A zesty tale that balances darkness and light with aplomb.
A powerful morality tale with laughs.
This is award-winning Mexican writer Villoro's first novel to be translated into English. While his story collection, The Guilty (2015), displayed his postmodernist leanings, this novel, originally published in 2012, showcases his edgy black humor and absurdist side. Meet Tony Góngora, our laid-back, heavy-drinking narrator, a 53-year-old former rock musician. (Picture a Mexican sort-of version of the Dude, Jeff Bridges' character from The Big Lebowski.) He's lost part of a finger and limps, and due to extensive drug use, he's also lost part of his memory, which he’s trying to get back. He builds and runs underwater sound systems for aquariums at The Pyramid resort in Kukulcán, on the Caribbean coast. It and other resorts, now vacant, rise up “along the shore like vertical mausoleums, circled by seagulls and ravaged by plants and rats.” The sand’s washing away. Oil rigs and city water have contaminated the sea and are now threatening “the second-largest coral reef in the world.” Thanks to manager Mario Müller, Tony’s friend and fellow ex–band member, and investor El Gringo Peterson, The Pyramid is hanging on because of its unique tourist offerings. Now a “Sodom with piña coladas,” it provides “extreme tourism.” Guests can experience “recreational paranoia” like fake kidnappings and other controlled dangers. Tony has the hots for Sandra, an illegal immigrant from Iowa who works there as a yoga/kung fu instructor. Then Ginger Oldenville, one of the resort’s diving instructors, turns up dead—shot in the back with a spear gun. In this warped utopia, the death loomed “like the black cloud of an approaching hurricane.” Villoro mixes genres (noirish murder mystery, eco-thriller) to fashion a wickedly satirical romp of Mexico as a “country of enormous delusions.” But that’s not all. It’s also a thoughtful tale of friendship and love.
A zesty tale that balances darkness and light with aplomb.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-80760-021-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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