NIGHT OF FIRE

Name: NIGHT OF FIRE
Author: Colin Thubron
ISBN: 978-0-06249974-5

by Colin Thubron ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2017

Thubron isn’t subtle in his themes or structure, but he intrigues with his many resonances and takes the reader on a journey...

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Flashbacks provide a glimpse of the lives of seven seemingly disconnected people who occupy an old British building in this engrossing novel by the celebrated travel writer.

Faulty wiring sparks a fire one night in the basement of the building, and as it moves from flat to flat, Thubron (To a Mountain in Tibet, 2011, etc.) visits each tenant in six long chapters, all bracketed by two short ones on the landlord. “Priest” features a cleric named Stephen as a photograph sends his memory back 50 years through a variety of religious experiences, from the seminary to the asceticism of a Mount Athos monastery and missionary work in Tanzania. Memory is both physical and personal in the “Neurosurgeon” section, which alternates between the doctor on a hike deciding whether to propose to his companion and contemplating operations where patients may lose more than excised tissue. In the “Naturalist” section, the title character is Stephanie, the frequent subject is butterflies—sometimes thought to be “spirits of the departed”—and the book’s high point of sensuality is her making love with a woman named Samantha. The “Photographer” is Steve, who tries to reach his dead mother through a séance. The “Schoolboy” lies to gain sympathy by saying his parents are dead. And then comes the “Traveller,” named Steven, who has been roaming for 50 years. He has recently had brain surgery. He visits a Tibetan monastery in Varanasi, where the dead are burned in public. The book by this point is bursting not just with variations of Stephen, but with nearby death, which all the building’s dwellers may be facing on the night of fire they unavoidably share, as the traveler unites them in mirroring many details of their stories—a pilgrim not unlike the author, who is 77 and can look back at 50 years of travel and fiction writing.

Thubron isn’t subtle in his themes or structure, but he intrigues with his many resonances and takes the reader on a journey through life’s essential questions.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06249974-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE AMUR RIVER
by Colin Thubron

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BROKEN ROAD
by Patrick Leigh Fermor ; edited by Artemis Cooper ; Colin Thubron

- BOOK REVIEW
TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET
by Colin Thubron

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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.