A must-read masterwork by an author whose star should shine brighter in the contemporary firmament.
“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….”
The opening line of Quin’s (The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, 2018, etc.) debut novel, originally published in 1964, firmly establishes the British midcentury experimentalist’s intentions for the story to follow. Arriving in an unnamed coastal town resembling Brighton in the offseason, Berg takes a room in a boardinghouse with only a shared particle-board wall separating him from his elderly father—estranged from Berg since childhood—and his father’s much younger mistress, Judith. As he lies in bed listening to the couple's amorous exertions on the other side of the wall, Berg plots his father’s death as a sort of revenge gift to his mother, a fragile and perpetually flustered woman named Edith. The Oedipal strains of the plot continue to thicken as Berg embarks on a faltering seduction of the feral Judith that’s marked by increasingly desperate murder attempts against his feckless, opportunistic father. In the febrile world of postwar England, where the class-driven banalities of poverty meet the geopolitical banalities of a generation for whom heroism is something their parents did, Berg strains against his environment, his desire, his body, and his own psychology in a prose that kinks ever darker and more internal. Quin masterfully blends Berg’s memories, sense impressions, and hallucinations with snippets of preserved text from his mother’s letters so that every scene takes place in prismatic multitude in a style influenced by Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras. As the plot becomes more and more ludicrous, Quin’s black humor becomes apparent. Berg is reprehensible but also the sort of sweaty bumbler whose physical comedy as he drags what he believes to be his father’s corpse across town is reminiscent of a classic French farce. Judith, a Freudian grotesque in her own right, is also a deadpan put-down artist with a weakness for impractical shoes. The result is a caustic, destabilizing, and very funny exploration of depravity in a world where nothing seems all that depraved but where the daily exigencies of living overwhelm with their ordinary demands.
A must-read masterwork by an author whose star should shine brighter in the contemporary firmament.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-911508-54-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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