An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving.
A pensive, provocative novel of history, memory, and our endlessly blood-soaked times by one of the foremost writers to have emerged from the former Yugoslavia.
“Andreas Ban feeds himself with other people’s lives on his journey towards death, that most powerful goddess of ultimate oblivion,” writes Croatian novelist Drndic (Leica Format, 2015, etc.). Ban has retreated from psychological practice after finally despairing of figuring people out, has retreated from writing after running out of things to say, but he has not stopped visiting the past. Once familiar with every corner of Paris and New York, he now lives in a provincial town on the Adriatic coast, slowly falling apart and, in his disintegration, quite obviously hastening toward death; now he is living with memories, recalling “old friendships, dead loves, abandoned towns, books, books, real and unreal characters….” As he remembers, as he sifts through all those books and his files, he makes one troubling connection after another. An exile from the town dreams of murdering his father, who in turn has taken part in the murder of its Jews, all of which, remembering, Ban cannot corroborate because everyone involved is long dead; a superb director whose films he admires turns out to have made a hateful pro-Nazi film during the war, then, soon after, a socialist-realist homage to Yugoslavia’s Communist regime without missing a step; and so on. “How can it be, one minute this, the next that?” It is all enough to drive Ban to distraction, along with his steadily dissolving vertebrae and what he is sure is a lurking cancer. There are remedies: he can stop thinking, stop remembering, stop accumulating odd bits of knowledge on the shape of ears, the habits of lobsters, depression among zoo animals, and so on, and slip away. Or he can take matters into his own hands, whence the title of Drndic’s book, which, though somber, ends on an unexpectedly hopeful note.
An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2721-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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