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THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS

Name: THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS
Author: Chloe Benjamin
ISBN: 9781476761169

by Chloe Benjamin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2014

Though Benjamin can turn a nice phrase, this is an uneven first novel.

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Dream researchers probe the subconscious, moral responsibility and the power of dreams on waking life.

Sylvie narrates the story of her entanglement with Adrian Keller, a renegade researcher interested in lucid dreaming, and his acolyte, Gabe. Keller is the headmaster at Mills, a prep school in Northern California (having mysteriously left his university position), and Gabe is part of a group of quick-witted teenage students. Sylvie and Gabe become inseparable, though she tries to ignore his suspicious comings and goings from Keller’s cottage. And then, without explanation, Gabe leaves school and vanishes from Sylvie’s life until her final year at UC Berkeley. He begins stalking her, and when she confronts him, he asks the unthinkable—that she drop out of college and work with him as a research assistant at Keller’s sleep institute. Sylvie is still in love with Gabe, so the two work with Keller on Martha’s Vineyard, then at Fort Bragg and finally in the neuroscience department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. People with serious sleep disorders—sleepwalking and night terrors—come to learn lucid dreaming in hopes that the lucidity will help end their dangerous behaviors. In Madison they are neighbors to a flirty Finnish couple, academics who question the ethics of their research; they suggest that a person’s knowledge of his or her deepest self can be treacherous. Unfortunately, none of this is as compelling or mysterious as Sylvie’s narrative tries to make it sound. Further impairing the novel are the frequent chronological shifts used to build suspense; the flipping back and forth merely muddles the plot. As Sylvie begins to question Keller’s work, she discovers the sordid truth about everything, but the twist at the end is hardly shocking enough to excuse the slow buildup.

Though Benjamin can turn a nice phrase, this is an uneven first novel.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014

ISBN: 9781476761169

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Chloe K. Benjamin

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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.