Critics' choices for Christmas From the "Book of Nonsense" to the "Vegetarian Planet," the joys of "Hardboiled America" to "The Bridge on the Drina," our critics urge you to stuff your stockings with good books this Christmas
Bell, Robert H
Robert H. Bell Robert H. Bell is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at Williams College, where he directs the Project for Effective Teaching. A book of great power and permanent value is...
...Although the language is occasionally overwrought, and the tragedy too heavily foreshadowed, this book is deeply compelling especially the passionate love scene and the shattering denouement...
...Carroll's father was Joseph Carroll, an FBI agent, commissioned the youngest general in Air Force history, and founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...How did their mother die and why did their father, a prominent naturalist, commit suicide...
...The passions are potent, the magic bewitching, and the humor perpetual...
...Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things (Random House, $23, 319 pp...
...Reina and Constancia represent the divided spirit of Cuba...
...A best seller for several weeks, The God of Small Things has been awarded the 1997 Booker Prize...
...Jim Carroll was an all American boy: ROTC cadet of the-year at Georgetown, called to the priesthood, devoted to the poor and the black, opposed to the Vietnam War...
...Brilliant, beautiful, and heart-breaking, it won the National Book Award for nonfiction and is now available in paperback...
...Poems such as "The Want Bone" and "History of My Heart" are personal, intimate, and irresistible...
...Like Garcia's first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, The Aguero Sisters is a family saga spanning generations and oceans, with exiles figurative and literal, obsessions, passions, sex, and mystery...
...Her half-sister Constancia has a very different sort of white magic: the epitomical entrepreneur, she makes and markets fabulous cosmetics in Florida...
...I admired several new novels this year, including two by young women writing postcolonial magic realism...
...Cristina Garcia, magic realist, is for real...
...Here "Miracles arrive every day from the succulent edge of disaster, defying nature...
...One of our very best poets, Robert Pinsky, published The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-96 (Far-rar, Strauss, and Giroux, $30, 300 pp...
...The central characters are Indian twins, Rahel and her brother Estha, who are seven years old in 1969...
...Reading The Aguero Sisters, you can believe that...
...Garcia's prose has sweaty grit and wings of gossamer...
...A book of great power and permanent value is James Carroll's An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came between Us (Houghton-Mifflin, $23.95,279 pp...
...separated for thirty years, they reunite in Florida in 1991...
...This Odyssey hits all the marks...
...Garcia's great theme is "the nature of longing, the nervous pressure in the heart that never wanes," depicted with lush operatic excess...
...is an unrelentingly sad story narrated in extraordinary language, with grotesque and weird humor...
...Another first-rate novel is Cristina Garcia's The Aguero Sisters (Knopf, $24, 300 pp...
...This is a problem in Cuba...
...People may "die many times, but never forever...
...It's the adjectives "pigeon-toed and pestilential" that mark Garcia's outrageous, excessive, and triumphant vision...
...Also of exceptional merit are Robert Fagles's translations of The Iliad and, recently, The Odyssey (Viking, $35,541 pp...
...Self-consciously literary, Roy's style recalls the glories of Marquez and Rushdie: fabulist narrative, teeming with whimsy, verbal felicity, metaphoric possibilities...
...Writing about anything from tennis to psychiatrists, he is vital, wise, and funny...
...But most of all, and like The God of Small Things, The Aguerro Sisters lives in and for its language, to and from the sublime and ridiculous, from the cliched to the unknowable and unspeakable...
...Pinsky's poems also have cultural weight, lyric reach, mythic might, pervasive self-irony, and enormous gusto...
...Fagles's versions may well supersede the excellent translations of Lattimore and Fitzgerald to become the Homer of our time...
...Their relationship was dramatic and agonizing, especially when Jim became politically active and finally left the priesthood...
...General Carroll spied the Russian missies in Cuba, and for the entire course of the Vietnam War controlled the information and selected the targets...
...Pinsky is also a notable literary critic and a splendid translator of Dante's Inferno...
...Fagles conveys the key Homeric quality, energy...
...An American Requiem is a modern spiritual autobiography, gorgeously written, with the intricacy of great fiction...
...the salty brine, the weary vistas, the endless wandering, the confusion, terror, and loss...
...In Fagles's Homer both the gods and heroes are all too human and larger than life, vivid and dramatic...
...It's also a rich social history, with cameos of Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, Cardinal Francis Spellman, LBJ, JFK, Pope John XXIII even a genuine Elvis spotting...
...Reina Aguero, renowned Amazonian goddess, daring electrician, and fabled lover, lives in Castro's Cuba...
...Mundane reality is depicted in often lyrical language and punctuated with supernatural visitations, ghosts, spirits, and mystical musings...
...At one level, the story is an engaging mystery...
...Characters entertain ludicrously kooky beliefs, that "there's an unlicensed spot in the brain that if manipulated just right could keep a person happy for decades...
...Even the most gnarled, toothless, scabrous, sclerotic, pigeon-toed, pestilential men on the island believe themselves irresistible to women...
...What Fagles achieves is remarkable: an English Homer that conveys both the gritty realism and sublime nobility of the original Greek...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
