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STRANGE HOTEL

Name: STRANGE HOTEL
Author: Eimear McBride
ISBN: 978-0-374-27062-9

by Eimear McBride ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020

A bridge work that will hopefully lead to McBride’s next major novel.

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The third novel from the unique Irish author.

After her dazzling debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014)—winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others—McBride took a slight step back in The Lesser Bohemians (though that book did win the 2016 James Tait Black Memorial Prize). In her latest, a slim book that could be considered a novella, the author yet again dives relentlessly into the interior of her unnamed protagonist, narrating her travels to anonymous hotels in Avignon, France, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, and Austin. In each locale, she drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, and engages in one-night stands and lengthy bouts of what she admits is “existential overindulgence,” desperately seeking to avoid any further thoughts of an unnamed trauma that she suffered in the past (likely the loss of the father of her child, referenced only obliquely at moments throughout the book). The narrative is focused almost entirely inward, structured like a lengthy interior monologue or self-negotiation that often grows claustrophobic. Consistently, the protagonist reverts to her “preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it….Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train.” It’s clear that the woman has endured significant emotional and spiritual pain. However, in relating her thoughts, she may be “relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which...serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.” As in McBride's previous books, there are numerous sparks of singularly brilliant prose—e.g., “Outside the sky’s a horror of fight and bruise. Velour black, pumped with racket, gored by orange.” Ultimately, though, as the protagonist herself acknowledges, “the time for this digression is up. She should really be getting off this subject.” Readers will agree at many points in her story.

A bridge work that will hopefully lead to McBride’s next major novel.

Pub Date: May 5, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-374-27062-9

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LESSER BOHEMIANS
by Eimear McBride

- BOOK REVIEW
A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING
by Eimear McBride

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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.