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MARA AND DANN

Name: MARA AND DANN
Author: Doris Lessing
ISBN: 0-06-018294-6

by Doris Lessing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 1999

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Lessing’s 22nd novel, a dystopian allegory set in “Ifrik” (formerly Africa) thousands of years hence, is a ponderous, hectoring, fascinating second cousin to her Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) and The Four-Gated City (1969) (and quite reminiscent, incidentally, of Norman Mailer’s similarly forbidding Ancient Evenings). After a global war and second Ice Age have decimated the continent and a more recent drought has made “civilization” only a distant memory, two children, seven-year-old Mara and her younger brother Dann, are abducted and forced to join a slow northward migration, toward water and the remnants of destroyed cities. As they grow to adulthood, together and apart, both are subjected to numbingly repetitive ordeals: capture by conflicting “armies”; enslavement for various purposes (Dann suffers both drug addiction and homosexual rape, while Mara is exploited as a spy and as a “breeder”); and hairbreadth escapes (rather too many) from their several oppressors. Eventually reaching a northern territory where specific knowledge of their culture’s past is available, Mara and Dann learn the secret of their own origin—and the duty they were born for but now reject. Neither plot nor characterization is Lessing’s strongest suit, and the story’s climactic developments may strike some readers as willful overkill, but this often frustratingly turgid tale generates considerable power nevertheless. The world Lessing’s opaque protagonists inhabit has been imagined in weirdly convincing detail: cities (“as temporary as dreams”) lie drowned beneath scarce remaining rivers, which run shallow and are infested with “water dragons” (crocodiles) and other exotic predators; men struggle for dominion over exhausted land; and women scheme to outwit male “rulers.” The powerful, almost erotic attraction between brother and sister is virtually palpable—as are Mara’s fierce hungers: to give birth, be loved, and learn the history of the world crumbling around her. As demanding and intermittently infuriating as anything Lessing has ever written—and as necessary. She isn’t a stylist, and she takes no prisoners, but this writer remains one of contemporary fiction’s genuine thinkers and visionaries, and it would be folly to ignore her.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1999

ISBN: 0-06-018294-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ALFRED AND EMILY
by Doris Lessing

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CLEFT
by Doris Lessing

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG
by Doris Lessing

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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.