BOOK REVIEW continued from page 13


intriguing, Kingsolver falters a bit here compared to past works like The Poisonwood Bible. The problem as I see it is her decision to tell the story of a lonely, mixed-parentage boy growing up in 1930’s Mexico exclusively through notes, diary entries, letters and the like. There is no narrative per se, although her skills as a storyteller are amplified by her chosen approach. It gets a little thin, even as the historical figures she ties her fictional character (author Harrison Shepherd) to - the exiled anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky, the muralist Diego Riviera and his headstrong, sickly wife Frieda Kahlo, among others - give it intriguing perspective and a broad scope. Too much of Sheppard’s life post-Mexico, battling charges of McCarthy- driven anti-communism in the 1950’s, makes for a predictable but unsatisfying ending.


The Bad


Girl - Mario Vargas Llohsa: I read one of the Peruvian novelist’s books ages ago, The Green Door I think it was,


and hadn’t ventured back since. It was pretty lame - wordy, dense and lacking a focus as I recall. This one is much better. It’s an enjoyable chronological telling of unrequited love/permanence by our hapless protagonist. As a young man in the bourgeois Lima district of Miraflores he’s smitten by the fifteen year-old “bad girl”. Fated to pursue and be played by her time and again, his life spins out over decades that are empathetically difficult. He is taunted, cajoled, humiliated and eventually enveloped by the titular female Medusa. Or is she really that? Erotic, exotic in its dynamics and locales, The Bad Girl is cautionary, but ultimately sweetly uplifting and www.bounder.ca


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Society of Ottawa BOUNDER MAGAZINE 55


sorrowfully real. Twain & Stanley Enter


Paradise - Oscar Hijuelos: The prize-winning novelist’s last work (he died suddenly in 2013, the novel was published in 2015) is a flight of fancy and imagination. Taking two prominent historical figures, the American writer Samuel Clemens and the English explorer Henry Stanley, who had a very passing acquaintance, Hijuelos envisions their lives entwined, intersecting and a close friendship at play. From the Mississippi to Cuba, the continent to London society, he presents them as comrades, correspondents and companions throughout the years of fame. As illness, tragedy and old age envelop each, correspondence - often conveyed through Stanley’s aristocratic artist wife, Dorothy Tennant - becomes the fictional linkage. Melancholic towards the end, the novel is a well-written, exhaustively researched supposition on what could have been.


The Night of the Gun - David


Carr: This is a gutsy, soul-baring account of addiction, redemption, relapse and recovery. The subject? Carr’s life - as he remembers it, looking back 20 years afterwards. Growing up in a rowdy “tribal” Irish family in Minneapolis, he slid into alcohol and drug abuse effortlessly as a social, charming, “party” guy. Soon he was dealing coke, smoking crack and abusing his friends and acquaintances, living large, all while managing - barely - to keep various jobs as a journalist. By the time he was shooting cocaine into his veins, even that semblance of normalcy was gone. The birth of his twin daughters prematurely by his addict partner ultimately set him on the road to sobriety. Many struggles along the way, combined with introspective, matter-of-fact and sometimes sparkling writing, make this harrowing self-memoir a cautionary tale of what too many good times can eventually lead to.


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