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THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM

Name: THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM
Author: Ayse Papatya Bucak
ISBN: 978-1-324-00297-0

AND OTHER STORIES

by Ayse Papatya Bucak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2019

Cerebral yet high-spirited.

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If these 10 short stories took a DNA test, they’d find out they were part myth, part postmodern tale, part encyclopedia entry, part Donald Barthelme.

Repeated elements of Bucak’s debut collection include sideshows and exhibitions; survivors of bombings and genocide; characters known as the Turk, the Terrible Turk, and the Turkish Girl; fourth-wall-breaking addresses to the reader—“I know what she said. But I will not tell you. This is your story, not mine.” There are real people you might not have known about as well as other people who seem real but are made up. Khalil Bey, a diplomat who helped end the Crimean War, also “the world’s most notorious collector of the world’s most notorious collection of erotic art,” is the main character of “An Ottoman’s Arabesque.” Both he and the masterpieces by Courbet and Ingres that he owned are real. A story called “The Dead,” set in Key West, about the annual birthday party thrown by his wife for Edward J. Arapian “a.k.a. The Sponge King” —real people—features an invented character named Anahid Restrepian, a young woman who wrote a book and starred in a popular movie about surviving the Armenian Atrocities. The Starving Girl, a college student from Turkey who stages a hunger strike in a story called “Iconography,” is so fictional that her story offers about a dozen different possible endings. “What do we need to do to make you eat?” the university president and her roommates beg to know. “Change everything,” she says. A favorite is “Mysteries of the Mountain South,” in which a recent college graduate detours to “Appa-latch-ia” to take care of her dying grandmother. She ends up falling in love with a young black mortician, a blogger like her, and learning that her own DNA includes Melungeon, a part-black and part-white racial designation which does in fact have a Wikipedia entry. “Edie and Michael would marry one day. They have to, don’t you think?”

Cerebral yet high-spirited.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-324-00297-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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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.