Two Words, One Answer.
1987 novel
 Execution, Texas: 1987: A Novel (Stonewall Inn Editions) $11.95 Execution Texas follows seventeen year old Seeger King, who lives in the small town of Execution, Texas, not far from Dallas, through his last year at high school and to his departure to university. It is a troubled year for the young Seeger, seemingly content with his bi-status, although perhaps more drawn to boys than girls despite having a steady girl, Cordelia. But he is uncertain about his loves and obsessed with a younger boy Kent; he's pestered by his psychic, doom forecasting absent mother; and worried about the visions he has over the fate of his father and stepmother. It is an engaging enough story, frequently digressing into Seeger's dreams or flashbacks; but while the action moves along fairly swiftly, these interruptions do tend to spoil the flow - I found myself after a while hurrying through some of these digressions and becoming impatient to get back to the present. Execution Texas is good in parts, but it did not fully grab my attention - not a story with which I became fully involved.  The Sheltering Sky $2.99 Not long before Paul Bowles's death he had a reunion with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in a hotel room as part of a documentary called "Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles." When the subject of the Bertolucci film of "The Sheltering Sky" came up, Bowles said "The whole thing was horrible, but especially the ending." One assumes this got back to Bertolucci.  Before: A Novel : With Stories 1987-1992 $13.00 Very self indulgent. It reads like the self-obsessed, adolescent voice in Catcher in the Rye, but without that novel's artistry or craft. It's as if Holden Caulfield never grew up. It exudes a general bitterness about humanity. The prose is workman like at best, awkward at most. It's the kind of revenge ramblings that would have been better left in a personal journal. It doesn't translate as literature.  The Colombian Novel, 1844-1987 $25.00 Novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude have awakened Englishlanguage readers to the existence of Colombian literature in recent years, but Colombia has a well-established literary tradition that far predates the Latin American "boom." In this pathfinding study, Raymond Leslie Williams provides an overview of seventeen major authors and more than one hundred works spanning the years 1844 to 1987. After an introductory discussion of Colombian regionalism and novelistic development, Williams considers the novels produced in Colombia's four semi-autonomous regions. The Interior Highland Region is represented by novels ranging from Eugenio D«¿az' Manuela to Eduardo Caballero Calder«Ñn's El buen salvaje. The Costa Region is represented by Juan Jos«± Nieto's Ingermina to Alvaro Cepeda Samudio's La casa grande and Gabriel Garc«¿a M«¡rquez' Cien a«Ðos de soledad; the Greater Antioquian Region by Tom«¡s Carrasquilla's Frutos de mi tierra to Manuel Mej«¿a Vallejo's El d«¿a se«Ðalado; and the Greater Cauca Region by Jorge Isaacs' Maria to Gustavo Alvarez Gardeaz«¡bal's El bazar de los idiotas. A discussion of the modern and postmodern novel concludes the study, with special consideration given to the works of Garc«¿a M«¡rquez and Moreno-Dur«¡n. Written in a style accessible to a wide audience, The Colombian Novel will be a foundational work for all students of Colombian culture and Latin American literature. |
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