A richly layered, difficult text that may well be worth the several readings it probably requires.
An inordinately ambitious first novel, the work of a Westerner living in Japan, traces a chain of events that affect lives on several continents, explored in stories “ghostwritten” by other (in some cases, literally alien) intelligences than those of the people who experience them.
The narrative begins and ends (in “Okinawa,” then “Underground”) in the mind of a member of a millennial cult that commits mass murder by releasing poison gas into the Tokyo subway system. An errant phone call links him with a Korean-born music-store clerk working in “Tokyo” who’s smitten with a beautiful student, and follows her to “Hong Kong.” There, the couple are glancingly observed by a British finance lawyer who’s cast off by his resentful (childless) wife, sexually dominated by their Chinese maid, drawn into money-laundering for a Russian criminal conspiracy, and haunted by the unthreatening ghost of a young Oriental girl. Similarly accidental connections lead gradually from East to West, focusing on a series of art thefts that occur in “Petersburg,” a rootless jazz drummer’s sexual and artistic progress (as a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies) through London’s musical and political worlds, and a woman scientist’s painful exile from her past as part of a surveillance team performing secretive services—on an island off the coast of Ireland—for the US Department of Defense. This is a fairly extreme example of the contemporary “systems novel” (as practiced by Pynchon, DeLillo, McElroy, et al.) obsessed with the interrelationship—not to mention intricacy and opacity—of postindustrial culture’s supersophisticated technologies. The impression of a world systematically endangering itself lies heavily on every page. Hollander’s bleak black-comic dramatizations of the depersonalizing effects of a global village worshipping such strange new gods doesn’t entirely escape redundancy and obscurity, but the most interesting chapters, especially those depicting a Chinese woman victimized by Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a Mongolian spirit vainly seeking a stable “host” body, rise to impressive levels of both ingenuity and poignancy.
A richly layered, difficult text that may well be worth the several readings it probably requires.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-46304-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
