Shantytown

Shantytown
افزودن به بوکمارک اشتراک گذاری 0 دیدگاه کاربران 4 (1)

مشارکت: عنوان و توضیح کوتاه هر کتاب را ترجمه کنید این ترجمه بعد از تایید با نام شما در سایت نمایش داده خواهد شد.
iran گزارش تخلف

فرمت کتاب

ebook

تاریخ انتشار

2013

نویسنده

Chris Andrews

ناشر

New Directions

شابک

9780811221580
  • اطلاعات
  • نقد و بررسی
  • دیدگاه کاربران
برای مطالعه توضیحات وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

نقد و بررسی

Publisher's Weekly

October 28, 2013
This disappointing potboiler by the acclaimed author of The Hare and Varamo introduces Maxi, a muscular and dimwitted young man who spends his nights in a Buenos Aires shantytown helping trash pickers carry away their finds. Pitted against him is Deputy Inspector Cabezas, a cop looking for a way to crack open a drug ring, and who may or may not be the father of Cynthia, a young woman recently murdered. When Cabezas's attention is drawn toward Maxi, he uses Maxi's sister, Vanessa, and her friend, Jessica, to track Maxi down in an attempt to discover who is bringing the drugs into the nighborhood. In concise chapters, Aira takes us through each character's point of view, giving the reader a glimpse into their psyches, but slow pacing, random side plots, and a lack of resolution make it difficult to care. There are flashes of wonderful writing here, as when a torrential rainstorm gives Aira the chance to describe the shantytown and its lights poetically, and a murder that will take the reader by surprise, but neither is enough to compensate for the sluggish trek toward the end.



Kirkus

October 15, 2013
A tiny slice of Buenos Aires noir from one of Argentina's most prolific writers. An improvisational mood propels this novella-length story by Aira (The Hare, 2013, etc.), with crisp translation by Andrews. The book is set amid the trash district of Buenos Aires' slum settlements and concerns itself with the intersection of a number of characters. The first, Maxi, is a boxy, middle-class adolescent with his own Rolex who passes his days helping scavengers collect cardboard and other detritus for pocket change. He claims to have a curious form of night blindness that more closes resembles a darkness-triggered form of narcolepsy. Maxi's sister is Vanessa, a generally harmless girl who runs with a bad crowd. She comes under the influence of Inspector Ignacio Cabezas, a corrupt cop who wants to infiltrate the ranks of a drug sales operation known to locals as "the carousel" and gains Vanessa's trust by pretending to be the father of a girl from her school who was killed in a random shooting. The drug in question is an invention called proxidine, a powerful hallucinogenic that nearly kills a friend of Vanessa's. What seems to be interesting to Aira is the confluence of events that seems random but isn't, as he describes the lusty detective: "His mistake was thinking that a battle is fought at a single point in space," he writes. "That is not the case. A battle always covers a large area, and none of the participants can take it in at a glance, not even retrospectively. Nobody can grasp the whole, because in reality there is no whole to be grasped." Aira's work, like the fantasy How I Became a Nun (2007), is usually much more fantastic, so it's an interesting exercise to see the author playing with mystery conventions in a more realistic, if cinematic, style. A very literary crime story with South American attitude that is lean, spare and resonant.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.




دیدگاه کاربران

دیدگاه خود را بنویسید
|