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SOMETHING LIKE BREATHING

Name: SOMETHING LIKE BREATHING
Author: Angela Readman
ISBN: 978-1-911508-30-4

by Angela Readman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2019

An offbeat, enigmatic parable of otherness and attachment, with a style to match.

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A curious, sometimes-comic tale of female friendship set on a remote Scottish island fuses the bizarre, the banal, and the miraculous.

In her debut novel, English poet and short-story writer Readman explores the contrasting perspectives of two teenagers whose uneasy relationship as friends and neighbors begins when Lorrie Wilson and her family return to live on the island where her grandfather runs a whisky distillery. The next-door cottage is inhabited by widowed Bunny Tyler and her daughter, Sylvie, a shy, sealed-up child who is as unpopular at school as Lorrie is quickly popular. Set first in 1957 and then 1960, Readman’s quirky story happily evokes the texture of daily life in a distant place and era—Tupperware boxes, biscuit barrels, Mario Lanza on the radio, Domestic Science classes, and portable record players. In this world, Lorrie tends toward the predictable, finding a new, more glamorous friend called Blair and beginning to experiment with boys. Sylvie, meanwhile, retains her oddness, wearing shapeless, ugly clothes and refusing to kiss a boy who, surprisingly, is attracted to her. Her secret and Bunny’s smotheringly repressive response to it contrast with Lorrie’s warmer but still mildly peculiar household, from which her father disappears for several days, then returns without shoes or car, having given them away to needier folk. Odd and slightly out-of-kilter, Readman’s narrative has an essential deadpan charm, dotted with striking, sideways observations, yet her inventive premise, once launched, seems to run short of ideas as to where it might go. Nevertheless, and despite its simplicity, the story lends itself to multiple layers of interpretation and metaphor—the limits of friendship; mythmaking; the unavoidable exploration of self—and ends with a breezy admission of life’s opacity.

An offbeat, enigmatic parable of otherness and attachment, with a style to match.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-911508-30-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: & Other Stories

Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018

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.