THE DIVER

Name: THE DIVER
Author: Alfred Neven DuMont
ISBN: 978-0-312-64798-8

by Alfred Neven DuMont & translated by David Dollenmayer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2010

Although the plot occasionally takes banal turns, character voices, as rendered by Dollenmayer’s unassuming translation,...

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An octogenarian reflects ruefully on his beloved daughter’s death and wonders if he could have prevented it, in German media magnate DuMont’s debut novel.

Albert, a self-described “old man,” is battling Parkinsonian tremors and weakness. He and his wife Ann live a quiet existence in a suburb of an unnamed German city. Sporadically cheered by his successful though somewhat obtuse son Anton, and three grandchildren, Albert is still mostly mired in grief over his daughter Gloria’s drowning death in the Caribbean two years before. Gloria had gone scuba diving with her diving-instructor lover and her best friend Christie and swam away from them into the depths—her body was never recovered. Christie, a young doctor just returned from her humanitarian work in Africa, is bent on reviewing the incident with Albert. Since Ann has departed for the bedside of her dying sister, Albert is free to go with Christie on a road trip to her adoptive mother Lena’s country cottage. There, Christie reads to the elders from her journal. Albert is forced to relive Gloria’s worsening depression, which began in adolescence and resisted all psychiatric intervention including hospitalization. Lena must confront her own dark memories: a puritanical husband and her struggles to adopt Christie over his objections. Just when widowhood promised freedom, Christie’s grifter birth parents surfaced with blackmail threats, and teenage Christie deserted her mother for Albert and Ann’s more stable-appearing home. Although up to now only superficially acquainted, Albert and Lena, thrust together, manage to prove that sparks can still fly at their age. Meanwhile, the death of Ann’s younger sister, who never married and lived only for glamour and grand passion, has taught Ann the meaning of existing in the moment. Will Albert recover from his grief, especially since a guilty secret is bound up in it?

Although the plot occasionally takes banal turns, character voices, as rendered by Dollenmayer’s unassuming translation, lend meditative gravitas to the melodrama.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-64798-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010

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.