Customer Reviews

Thine is the Kingdom

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you like sweeping dream-logic novels, can follow narrative hops from one character to another, and weave divergent threads together to create a multi-hued "whoe", you might like this. If you enjoy the technical aspects of a story as much as a the story itself, you might like this. If you think you might like a story about an entire island, you might like this. If you are looking for a straight foward story about one thing, then you'll hate it.

This novel maybe too intellectual or too "artistic" for many readers, but for those who are drawn under its spell (and not turned off by its sometimes raw sexuality) it is entirely engrossing. Here are some quotes from mainstream reviews:

"It probably flatters diehard magical realists who have preceded Abilio Estevez that this young Cuban writer has tried to perpetuate more than just a hint of a Marquezian style and view of the world that by many readers' standards has grown a little long in the tooth. That said, it must be added that there are few magical realists who can lay claim to the sustained and complex weave of storytelling, mythicizing, theatrical asides, and outright theorizing that characterize Thine Is the Kingdom.... The reader must commend the novel's translator, David Frye, for his masterful transformation of the complex Spanish prose into an equally complex and convincing English. A lesser transformation could have rendered the work nearly unreadable, but the art is apparent on every page.... This is Abilio Estevez's first novel, and it is a remarkable achievement. He has confidently merged views of art, society, and politics in an ingenious creation." (World Literature Today, Winter 2000, review by Leland Guyer.)

"Estévez's prose is rich with allusions to art and literature, and in David Frye's translation it rolls in lucid, rhythmic waves. The disembodied, dreamlike narrative serves its purpose: Estévez immerses us in history in order to transcend it, shuffles the temporal in order to suggest the eternal. As for the mixed identities of the multiple narrative voices, Estévez explicitly invokes that eternal tale-teller herself, Scheherazade. The freedom of art is set against the confinement of political and geographic realities." (New York Times review, April 4, 1999, by Jon Gareick.)

I was hoping that it wasn't just me. I've started this book 4 times now and just can seem to make any sense of it. On the cover it sounds great, but I was thinking the same thing as the other reviewer....that there must have been something lost in the translation from Spanish to English.

Ugh! My book club selected this book last month. Something we all regreted. We're wondering if something got lost in the translation from Spanish to English. The biggest flaw with this book: no plot.