bookshelf

CALPURNIA

Name: CALPURNIA
Author: Anne Scott
ISBN: 0-375-41380-4

by Anne Scott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 19, 2003

A debut novel of impeccable manners that will appeal nicely to the artistic set.

bookshelf

A fastidious first novel of objets d’art unearths ancestral secrets of a once-great Philadelphia house.

The estate sale of Villa Calpurnia (pretentiously named after Caesar’s conniving wife) brings together a well-mannered, faintly sinister cast of characters to bicker over the possessions of its deceased owner, Maribel Davies, a painter of aristocratic pedigree but bohemian tastes. Maribel, elderly and suffering from breast cancer, has died under cloudy circumstances, casting a whiff of suspicion around surviving loved ones such as her late-30s layabout substance-abusing son Coby; her niece and executor Nina, whom she raised like a spoiled daughter; her weepy lover Roberto; and nosy, protective neighbor Peg, who over the hedge watches the comings-and-goings at Calpurnia. The estate liquidizer, Elizabeth Oliver, a mid-40s blond divorcée struggling to make a respectable living, has been hired by the family to make order of Maribel’s Victoriana, which she does with expertly fussy thoroughness; in fact, Elizabeth’s reluctant contacts with louche art dealer Ellios, who once made a pass at her, leads to their secret discovery of Maribel’s cache of erotic drawings, supposedly the work of the fashionable portrait artist of the day, Lipscomb, once a lover of Maribel’s. Each of these characters has his or her own say from one stream-of-consciousness chapter to the next, until Elizabeth’s touchingly normal story takes precedence as she tries to maintain her stiff-upper-lip cordiality in the face of Ellios’s venal innuendo. Shockingly, Scott’s well-spoken Main Liners tend to lapse into similar stock phrases (“tongues will wag,” “let’s be honest”), and all begin to sound like the same frozen Episcopalian that Elizabeth is—except for the deliciously villainous Ellios, whose courtly machinations are skillfully delineated. With mastery, Scott obsessively chronicles surfaces—she tends to tell versus show—without delving too deeply into the messy inner lives of her tidy characters. Overall, she achieves a fetishistic catalogue of objects, to the detriment of story and suspense.

A debut novel of impeccable manners that will appeal nicely to the artistic set.

Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-41380-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.