Moving and thoughtful, this novel—despite its slight frame—has a lot to say.
Translated from the French in which he writes (The Life of an Unknown Man, 2012, etc.), Siberian-born Makine’s slim novel portrays the dangers of communism from the point of view of a romantic man.
The narrator is a middle-aged orphan looking back on his life in Soviet Russia, and the chapters are brief and often self-contained; this episodic book is about accumulation, not plot, and the narrator’s thoughts drift into memories of lost loves, the ravages of communism, and poetic dissidents—notably, a man named Dmitri Ress, who “never had the time to be in love” (this isn’t a shy book…). The structure, eschewing any strict chronology, creates an odd effect in the reader: everything seems to happen all at once. Does this sound shapeless? Not at all. Instead, the book is loose in the way of memory, as one thought blurs into another, touching on minutiae one minute, history the next. In this way, Makine’s book recalls work by Kundera and Sebald, those grand Europeans who wrote elliptical works combining the personal with the global. Here, he wants no less to write an old-fashioned novel of ideas, and he succeeds because he always finds something strong and concrete on which to pin his loftier notions. Consider one of the novel’s more powerful passages: a man visits the orphanage to sing the praises of Lenin, whom he once met. The narrator is unconvinced, considering this visitor “a man too meticulous, too smooth, lacking the bitter stench of History.” Instead, he seeks out an old woman who was apparently very close to Lenin, but he discovers her home an absolute wreck. What ultimately happened to her, as the narrator learns, expresses the great irony of communism: it aims to elevate the worker but instead dirties the cracks of everyday life, leaving a mess for everyone to clean up.
Moving and thoughtful, this novel—despite its slight frame—has a lot to say.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-712-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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