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THE GOVERNESSES

Name: THE GOVERNESSES
Author: Anne Serre
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2807-7

by Anne Serre ; translated by Mark Hutchinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018

A sensualist, surrealist romp.

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Three young governesses upend the staid marriage of their employers and abandon their charges for erotic adventures in this exquisitely strange, novella-length fairy tale.

Monsieur and Madame Austeur and their passel of young boys occupy a country house with their three governesses, Eléonore, Inès, and Laura. Across the way, an old man spies on the young women—who tease him with erotic tableaux—through his telescope. These are no ordinary governesses, after all, and this is no ordinary country household. The governesses “wind up, all three, at the end of the afternoon when the garden is getting chilly, pressed up against the gates like dead butterflies,” waiting to seduce strangers who happen to walk by. Told in surrealist bursts, this novella combines the dreaminess of Barbara Comyns, Aimee Bender, and Kathryn Davis with the fairy-tale eroticism of Angela Carter. Each sentence evokes a dream logic both languid and circuitous as the governesses move through a fever of domesticity and sexual abandon. Serre works in fairy-tale archetypes, but she subverts them, too. Monsieur Austeur is an ironic but benevolent figure of order and masculinity who calms the feverish longings of his women just by concentrating late at night in his smoking room. “He receives all these cries, these chirrups and yelps from the women and children of the house, and, shuffling them together in his heart, sends them back transformed, slow and steady like the signals from a lighthouse.” But when Laura becomes pregnant after one of her many trysts, Monsieur’s order is upended, and he must succumb to the roiling femininity of a house full of caretakers, mothers, and desiring young women. This is a fascinating fable about marriage, longing, and sexual awakening—about what can happen within the walls of a house when the barriers between nature and domesticity are stretched to their breaking points.

A sensualist, surrealist romp.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2807-7

Page Count: 112

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOOL
by Anne Serre ; translated by Mark Hutchinson

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

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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.