A raucous, anguished, fast-paced story, tautly written and deeply rooted.
Award-winning Cuban writer and architect Gala links the fate of a community with the doomed construction of a cathedral in this dark, violent, often comic novel, his first to be translated into English.
The Stuart family's arrival in a rough part of Cienfuegos, Cuba, sparks the neighbors' interest: "If you're born black, you're already screwed; imagine if, in addition, you have to live in the squalid rooming houses of a neighborhood like this." Graffiti here in Punta Gotica reads "NO ONE GETS OUT OF THIS NEIGHBORHOOD ALIVE." The two Stuart sons are smart but odd, the beautiful daughter artistic. Their father, a religious zealot, is obsessed with building a cathedral. The architect hired to design it dreams of the city of the future, viewed from the back of an angel: "I saw the Cienfuegos of the future, a beautiful city, full of elegant buildings...the celestial Jerusalem." Events don't unfold that way, to say the least. Later the architect comes to believe "that it was called the Black Cathedral for those with darkness in their hearts." Told by a shifting, overlapping multitude of voices, the novel explores the interconnected lives of the local characters: kids, petty criminals, politicians, artists and writers, ghosts of people murdered by a serial killer, and the killer as well, speaking from death row. Though some move abroad, all find themselves affected by the violence and desperation of Punta Gotica and by its strange, unfinished building. As Arturo Stuart labors over "the first cathedral that is truly for and by the meek," one of his sons is initiated into the Cuban religion Palo, and the other finds work at a Russian mobster's brothel. The two sons eventually commit a terrible crime together (though worse crimes have already been done by an African Cuban character nicknamed Gringo). A retired principal of the Cienfuegos school laments of his former pupils, "They practically all turned out bad. Even the good ones aren't like we expected. I would call them the Black Cathedral generation." Trying to make sense of the Stuart boys' crime, one character says, "They were children, wicked children like all of us, children without a childhood."
A raucous, anguished, fast-paced story, tautly written and deeply rooted.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-11801-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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