Nowhere is Jean Rhys's talent for fully inhabiting the minds of her characters more apparent than in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, her masterful second novel. Rhys lays bare the desires and contradictions of her mercurial protagonist, Julia, in this haunting depiction of life after the end of a tumultuous affair.
Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers- one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs, ' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction. ' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.
Para la despreocupada o profana muchedumbre que no asiste a espectáculos deportivos o, si los presencia alguna vez, considera a sus intérpretes como seres privilegiados a quienes la fortuna sonríe constantemente, La noche será una aleccionada revelación. La atribulada existencia de Luis Canales descubrirá al lector que en el boxeo, como en todos los esfuerzos humanos, el triunfo es sumamente difícil y, aun conseguido, implica muchas veces dificultades insuperables y peligros angustiosos. No otro es el fondo de La noche, cuyo autor ha acertado a fijar el ambiente de los boxeadores, tanto en su modalidad espectacular como en su aspecto privado, para así captar la atención de los lectores al desarrollo de la acción, descrita con un ritmo muy apropiado al asunto elegido. La fluidez y precisión del estilo, y la perfecta trama ambiental son elementos básicos en esta novela.