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THE MIRRORED WORLD

Name: THE MIRRORED WORLD
Author: Debra Dean
ISBN: 978-0-06-123145-2

by Debra Dean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012

The novel follows the factual particulars, but Dasha’s narration remains at such a formal remove that readers never...

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From Dean (Confessions of a Falling Woman, 2008, etc.), a lightly fictionalized retelling of the life of the Eastern Orthodox St. Xenia, who left her comfortable home in 18th-century Russia to live as a “holy fool” among the poor.

Xenia’s cousin, Dasha, who grew up with Xenia and her older sister, Nadya, narrates Xenia’s history. From an early age, Xenia clearly has an independent spirit. She is an eccentric who cannot help showing her often-passionate feelings about the world around her without restraint. She also has dreams that are particularly vivid and can “see” what others cannot. At one of Empress Elizabeth’s balls, ethereally lovely Xenia doesn’t care that she makes a spectacle of herself over the choral singer Andrei because she knows immediately that she will marry him. It is a love match—Xenia may seem otherworldly, but she also enjoys earthly passion. Dasha does not find a husband because she is plain and enjoys reading—considered a dangerous ability among Russian women of her class. Living with Xenia and Andrei, Dasha witnesses Xenia’s meltdown after her infant daughter’s death. Then Andrei suffers a comic yet tragic death, falling down the steps in Xenia’s gown after attending the empress’ famous cross-dressing ball. Xenia’s first reaction is catatonic grief. Then, although almsgiving is against the law, she starts giving away her belongings to any beggar who asks. When Dasha at last marries an Italian castrato per Xenia’s prediction, Xenia’s wedding gift is her house. Calling herself Andrei and dressing in his clothes, Xenia lives on the streets among the poor. She becomes known as the “holy fool.” Widowed herself, Dasha is influenced by Xenia’s example to open her home to those in need. Xenia even leads Dasha to adopt a child in an underdeveloped plotline.

The novel follows the factual particulars, but Dasha’s narration remains at such a formal remove that readers never experience what makes Xenia tick as a saint or a woman.

Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-06-123145-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CONFESSIONS OF A FALLING WOMAN
by Debra Dean

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD
by Debra Dean

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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.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.