![]() ![]() Soon, Flannery is engrossed in a shadowy world of sex and money, while contemplating moral compromises that threaten her very soul. The job offer, to be clear, was at a clothing store … Strip Tees goes down as easy as a rum and Diet Coke, breezily written and punctuated at its intermission by a few pages of glossy photos. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a gorgeous stranger beckons with a mysterious job offer. Kate Flannery is down on her luck, out of work and nearly out of money, drinking alone at a bar in Los Angeles. “Though Strip Tees is a memoir, its story begins like a classic Hollywood noir. –Christian Lorentzen on Henry Bean’s The Nenoquich ( The New York Times Book Review) ‘All my friends,’ Harold says, ‘are moving from the flatlands up to the hills, and eventually they topple over the ridge into Los Angeles or New York.’ The Nenoquich now returns as a chronicle of sex and death in youth and a portrait of the baby boom generation at a turning point-between political radicalism and the path of temptation, fulfillment and disappointment that came to define it.” The book is told from a state of aftermath … Bean writes erotic scenes with a frankness and gusto uncommon in literary fiction today … Like his characters, Bean was not long for Berkeley. They usually tell us something about their moment’s sexual mores because more often than not their rakish heroes spend much of their idle days on romantic intrigues. One such case is Harold Raab, the narrator of Henry Bean’s first and only novel … Something else that hangs over The Nenoquich like an exhausted love affair is the 1960s. The books consider the possibilities of freedom and failure that arise from the times and places that inspired them, even if their protagonists are bound for the usual destination: bourgeois assimilation. Existing somehow outside the structures of family and regular employment, these prodigal sons have too much time on their hands - time to spend thinking, ranting, writing or intoxicating themselves. In the novels they narrate, they are suspended between delusions of grandeur and the dread of hitting rock bottom. ![]() ![]() “Cynicism, laziness, anger, misplaced righteousness, vacillation between vanity and self-loathing: Such are the qualities of the superfluous men we’ve encountered in novels for centuries. –Álvaro Enrigue on Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer ( BookPost) Catharsis-a sentiment strong enough to produce inner change-for a time when reality is amplified by the omnipresence of information.” A story, and all the data that needs to be known to be devastated by it. Over this melancholic narration, in which Mexico City is lyrically portraited as a beautiful but devastated landscape, Rivera Garza constructs her story as a monument, pulling information from all sorts of sources … Liliana’s Invincible Summer is not a journalistic book about the crime that led to the author’s sister’s death, nor is it a literary evocation of a life and the grief its vanishing produced, but something much more powerful that happens at the crossroads of narration and archive. As the political situation of Mexico become more and more asphyxiating for a population exhausted by the government’s failure to control the violence of organized crime, her narrative focus changed: her books became more defiantly political and more personal … The femicide of Liliana Rivera Garza went almost unnoticed by the press when it happened-July 1990-but, thanks to this book, has become emblematic of the failure of Mexican justice to prosecute crimes in which the victim is a woman … In the novel Cristina Rivera Garza describes the days she herself spent bouncing between precincts and judicial records buildings in search of the closed file on her sister’s murder. ![]() “Rivera Garza has an iron loyalty to her working method, whose goal is to find what is significant for the present in ignored episodes from the past. Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Álvaro Enrigue on Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Christian Lorentzen on Henry Bean’s The Nenoquich, Dana Schwartz on Kate Flannery’s Strip Tees, Nicole Flattery on Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare, and Hamilton Cain on Richard Russo’s Somebody’s Fool. ![]()
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