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THE MESSIAH OF STOCKHOLM

Name: THE MESSIAH OF STOCKHOLM
Author: Cynthia Ozick
ISBN: 0394756940

by Cynthia Ozick ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 1987

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The idea behind Ozick's short allegory is electric, arcing across the spaces between literature and salvation—but at such curt length, and so jammed, that the execution is staticky. Lars Andemening is the third-string book reviewer (the one who does "serious" books by European writers no one has much heard of) on an itself less-than-leading Stockholm daily. Divorced twice, Lars doesn't especially care about his lack of status, though; in private he has something more nourishing, i.e., the absolute conviction that he is the son of the Jewish Polish genius Bruno Schulz, tragically killed in the streets of his small Polish town by the S.S. So intent is he on seeing through his putative father's eyes that Lars has arranged to learn Polish so he can savor in the original the two extant short collections Schulz left. . .and dream in fidelity at least about the "lost" last work, The Messiah. Then one day Lars gets a message—from an old woman, a bookseller who's been his chief confidante concerning his self-assumed identity—that his sister is in Stockholm. He hates to believe that a sister even exists; and worse, when he meets the woman, she has brought along a manuscript stored in an amphora, claiming (as does the bookseller's husband, a Dr. Eklund, a shadowy expert in provenances) that it is The Messiah! Lars ultimately and violently does far worse than reject the woman and the manuscript. . .which is at about the point when a chill runs down a reader's spine: the title of the lost Schulz book in this context is no accident—and how will the imagination, when the time comes, react to real redemption? The most Jamesian of Ozick's very Master-imbued works, the novella's conceptual frame is clean, polished, and startling. Yet the actual prose is frantically busy; the dialogue is hyperbolic, tuned to an impossibly high, brassy pitch; and the allegory doesn't get enough space to insinuate, to slink in—it comes at you like a cuffing instead. Great fables, Schulz's themselves a prime example, at first wear a fake coat of innocence—yet Ozick seems not to have the patience for that: wanting the allegory to be morally indelible, it bursts toward us flood-like, and the result is smear. Challenging but twitchy work by one of our most remarkable stylists.

Pub Date: March 10, 1987

ISBN: 0394756940

Page Count: 141

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ANTIQUITIES
by Cynthia Ozick

- BOOK REVIEW
CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS
by Cynthia Ozick

- BOOK REVIEW
FOREIGN BODIES
by Cynthia Ozick

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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.