THE INFINITE TIDES

Name: THE INFINITE TIDES
Author: Christian Kiefer
ISBN: 978-1-60819-810-8

by Christian Kiefer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2012

A wonderfully executed debut novel, so rich as to inspire rereading, right down to its inevitable resolution, both ironic...

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In Kiefer’s debut literary novel, astronaut Keith Corcoran returns from the International Space Station to a house populated by a bare mattress, random canned goods and a gray leather sofa.

The astronaut’s beloved and gifted daughter is dead after a car accident, and his wife has left him, all while he spent months aboard the ISS. In a house in an economy-stalled suburb, Corcoran contemplates his world, and he is haunted by his near-metaphysical, unquantifiable experience in space. Corcoran’s life has always been measured by the fluidity of equations (he’s a math genius), which he believes can explain nearly everything. Now the numbers no longer add up. Empathetically drawn by Kiefer, Corcoran is a splendid protagonist, isolated from his lifelong ambition to be an astronaut by grief and migraines. “Everything in his life had telescoped into guilt and bereavement and a kind of emptiness he still did not entirely understand.” Kiefer also develops an imaginative and intriguing cast of characters: Barb, Corcoran’s wife, who initially supported the ambitious and driven man she married; Quinn, Corcoran’s daughter, the first in his world who also saw numbers as colors, as having emotions and characters; and Jennifer, the neighbor with whom he has a brief and unsatisfying affair. Most compelling are Peter and Luda, Ukrainian immigrants lost in America’s consumer culture. Peter grieves for his former profession as an astronomy technician, and Luda, quiet and beautiful, displays a moral intelligence that may right Corcoran’s world. Kiefer’s work is deeply symbolic, with Corcoran’s appreciation for the order and perfection to be found in equations and algorithms being contrasted against the chaos and entropy of his personal life. The narrative is straightforward and masterfully accomplished.

A wonderfully executed debut novel, so rich as to inspire rereading, right down to its inevitable resolution, both ironic and existentialist.

Pub Date: June 19, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-60819-810-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE HEART OF IT ALL
by Christian Kiefer

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by Christian Kiefer

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
by Chinua Achebe

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THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
by Chinua Achebe

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HOME AND EXILE
by Chinua Achebe

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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.