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VARIATIONS ON NIGHT AND DAY

Name: VARIATIONS ON NIGHT AND DAY
Author: Abdelrahman Munif
ISBN: 0-394-57673-X

VOL. III OF CITIES OF SALT

by Abdelrahman Munif ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 1993

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The final installment of Munif's Cities of Salt trilogy, first published in 1989, offers still another view of the same historical subject: the corruption of traditional Arab values when Western allegiances substitute power and money for family and tribal loyalties. Munif's hero this time is Sultan Khureybit of Mooran, whose 1930's friendship with the British surveyor Hamilton makes him the natural instrument of London's notion that a single strong sheikh in the area will be easier to deal with than the usual endless wrangle. Accordingly, Khureybit looks beyond the normal means of consolidating his power—alliances with other chieftains and wholesale marriages with their daughters—and begins to attack his neighbors with quiet backing from abroad. With the flight of Ibn Madi, sultan of Awali, Khureybit's dominion seems secure. But his alliances force him closer to friends worse than his enemies—from the ferocious chieftain Ibn Mayyah, who refuses to take prisoners during the siege of Awali, to his latest wife Najma, whose entrance into his harem sets off a firestorm of backbiting and violence. Tale's end finds Khureybit still riding high—backed by the British crown and seconded by Hamilton, now called Abdelsamad on his conversion to Islam—but he's become a paper tiger, an absurd figure whose power struggles with his old allies even within his family—fights he can't possibly lose, though they strip him of everything he once loved—grow increasingly farcical. Munif is no Euro-basher, as his sympathetic, incisive portrait of Hamilton, the most compelling of his characters, shows. All the more impressive, then, is his satirical review of a calamitous series of cultural exchanges that leaves his Arab potentate bloated with borrowed power and utterly without grace or dignity.

Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1993

ISBN: 0-394-57673-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993

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.