bookshelf

LINES ON THE WATER

Name: LINES ON THE WATER
Author: David Adams Richards
ISBN: 1-55970-635-1

A FLY FISHERMAN’S LIFE ON THE MIRAMICHI

by David Adams Richards ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

An affectionate tally of days on Canadian salmon rivers: and an envy-maker for those who only dream of wading in.

bookshelf

A gentle, almost shy evocation of New Brunswick’s Miramichi and of growing up along that great salmon river’s banks.

The Miramichi has long been a destination for wealthy anglers who jet in to spend a week at a fishing camp, but it is also a place where everyday Canadians live and work. If you’re one of them, and if you like to fish (a high probability) you will know the water better than any swell—know it for its eels and mackerel as well as its salmon, know the feeder streams, what flies to fish, and all about riparian laws. Richards (Mercy Among the Children, 2001) recounts stories of the guides, good ones and bad—though any of them could run rapids blindfolded or while turning handstands on a canoe’s brace—who labored under the class divisions, and others (among not a few ordinary citizens) who simply appreciated the river as a birthright, part of their vital fluids, and worth a fight: “To a poacher, the salmon or moose becomes a political weapon in a battle with other human beings, who have no other political weapons left to use.” At times it feels as though Richards is hardly bitter enough about the fact that he doesn’t have much access to his homewaters (“The law will always favor some more than others”), but he does manage to keep out of mischief by working hard to get there, hard enough to make him feel he’s one with the landscape. He’s most comfortable in the reverie of a backwoods camp with people who know not only secret waters but also when to fish them and from what vantage. Here are the stories of Richard’s gradual inclusion into that life.

An affectionate tally of days on Canadian salmon rivers: and an envy-maker for those who only dream of wading in.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-55970-635-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BAY OF LOVE AND SORROWS
by David Adams Richards

- BOOK REVIEW
MERCY AMONG THE CHILDREN
by David Adams Richards

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.