TEETHMARKS ON MY TONGUE

Name: TEETHMARKS ON MY TONGUE
Author: Eileen Battersby
ISBN: 978-1-62897-147-7

by Eileen Battersby ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2016

A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and...

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Competitive rider, aspiring physicist, brilliant and pertinacious teenager: Helen Stockton Defoe takes her place among literature's unforgettable deadpan narrators like Meursault and Oskar Matzerath.

In this first novel by Battersby (Ordinary Dogs: A Story of Two Lives, 2011, etc.), the literary correspondent for the Irish Times, Helen lives a charmed if lonely life of elite Southern privilege on her family's Richmond estate. Living amid her veterinarian father's thoroughbred-filled stables, she is kindly treated by her classmates but mostly friendless, wanting for nothing but emotionally disconnected from her arrogant, brooding father and frivolous, detached mother. When her mother is publicly shot by her crazed lover, Helen joins her father, who, like her, values animal companionship over human, in shrugging with bewilderment—and a touch of indifference—at her mother's violent and ignoble death. Helen is largely content to tend to her passions, science, art, and horses, until her father's beloved racehorse dies, leaving him awash in the bitterness and grief that failed to appear after his wife's murder; he denounces serious and disciplined Helen as a mere dilettante, bound not for a life of invention and discovery as the scientist she has always dreamed of becoming but that of a historian, an eternal observer. In disgust, she flees to Paris but, after a perilous incident with a loathsome stranger, regrets having chosen a city she'd never much cared about over Berlin, a place better suited to her character. Helen is saved from mounting self-loathing, despair, and aimlessness by an elderly lost dog who "wail[s] like a Confederate widow" and gives her a renewed sense of purpose. Her mission, to stay in Europe long enough to find a way to bring Hector back home to Richmond to die, leads her to a training yard in Amboise and to true passion, love, and sorrow.

A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and emotions despite upbringing and uncertainty.

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62897-147-7

Page Count: 414

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.