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LAMPSHADES

Name: LAMPSHADES
Author: Carole Morin
ISBN: 0-87951-857-X

by Carole Morin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1998

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The British columnist and memoirist (Dead Glamorous, 1997) cobbles together a kind of female, ’90s, Scottish-nihilist version of Catcher In the Rye featuring a fascist teenager who wanders London’s streets seeking out her true nature by shacking up with a fat old man, thinking mean thoughts about her mother, and pursuing the serial killer she loves. A big difference is that this heroine is stupid, racist, and unsympathetic—and the plot goes nowhere. Sophira van Ness is an unhappy 16-year-old: she hates her mother, who sold the family’s beloved mansion to its owner’s former maid; she hates filth, which she fights off with several showers a day and heavy doses of disinfectant; and she hates her life, stuck in Glasgow with no one to talk to but her imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, who she believes watches over her. Alienated from the human race since her brother’s death when they were children, Sophira apathetically accepts an invitation to share a bunk with a hanger-on at Balmoral Castle until they can cadge a ride to London. Unfortunately, Sophira hates London, too, with its filthy bathrooms and distasteful mix of races and social classes. Also, she has no money—but this problem is solved when Jack Grey, “schoolboy assassin aspiring actor and billionaire,” invites her to share his hotel room while he spends his night—apparently—murdering women. When Jack disappears for good, Sophira finds another sponsor in Count Saadi, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who’s producing a film about Hitler. The Count puts her up in his luxurious apartment, asking only for one chaste kiss a day, until Sophira realizes to her horror that she’s falling in love with him. Fleeing back to Glasgow, she learns that the maid who owned the mansion has died and the house has been sold again—to none other than Jack Grey, who, as star of a new film about Hitler’s life, now fully embodies Sophira’s ideal. Adolescent nastiness, pointless provocation, and empty attitude, whipped together into a muddy mix.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-87951-857-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.