Taut storytelling, if sometimes a bit too high-strung.
A clutch of brusque, seriocomic and sometimes forbidding tales about lust, loss and betrayal by the Slovenian author (You Do Understand, 2010).
Each of the 15 brief stories in this collection tends to be restricted to two people involved in conflicts that are either familial or romantic. In “Electric Guitar,” a teenage boy lives in terror of his abusive father until his effort to electrify his accordion provides a serendipitous if mordant solution to his plight. In “Total Recall,” a woman ponders getting back at the man who rejected her by spreading a rumor that he has AIDS. And in “What We Talk About,” a man and woman conduct a brief and awkward flirtation away from their significant others, until the tryst turns violent. The general theme here is that people tend to be punished for pursuing their desires, an idea Blatnik can turn into fablelike comedy, as in “A Thin Red Line,” in which an explorer studying human sacrifice turns out to be an example of it. Or Blatnik can be harrowing and blunt with the theme, as in “No,” a two-page sketch that presages a rape. Blatnik is inventive at imagining a breadth of conceits that work within his narrow tonal range (darkly comic or just plain dark), though the more interior the story, the less successful it is: “Bastards Play Love Songs” is little more than two friends ruminating on the Rolling Stones and love gone wrong, and “When Marta’s Son Returned” is a thin sketch about a PTSD-stricken soldier’s return home. Contrary to the way the flash fiction of You Do Understand thrived on its exceedingly narrow constraints, these stories improve as they expand. The best of the batch, “Closer,” features a man struggling to explain his separation to his young son, and each distant phone call makes his isolation all the clearer.
Taut storytelling, if sometimes a bit too high-strung.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62897-042-5
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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