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
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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