SILVER AND SALT

Name: SILVER AND SALT
Author: Elanor Dymott
ISBN: 978-0-393-23976-8

by Elanor Dymott ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2017

The grueling and fascinating process of photographic development reads like its own sort of poetry in this gut-wrenching,...

bookshelf

A famous photographer’s daughters come to terms with his death in the talented Dymott’s elegiac, devastating tale.

After the 2003 death of famous photographer Max Hollingbourne, his daughters, Ruthie and Vinny, retreat to the family’s villa in Greece, the scene of many dreamlike and bittersweet summers. Vinny is the responsible one, three years older than the volatile, sensitive Ruthie, and they mourn their father in very different ways, especially since Ruthie had been estranged from him for years. Dymott hints at tragedy to come during this final gathering, interweaving past and present and taking readers back to when Max first met 22-year-old Sophie in 1959 and made her his wife. Sophie gave up her singing career to raise Ruthie and Vinny, and Max was largely absent, traveling constantly for his work. Vinny always had an easy way with Max, something Ruthie envied, so when Ruthie asks that he teach her photography, she treasures the time in the darkroom, although his impatience with her was sometimes marked by cruelty and physical violence. Vinny and Ruthie are still little girls when their mother begins showing signs of mental illness, and she eventually leaves, marking a turning point for the girls and their father. Under the care of their Aunt Beatrice, whom they love dearly, the girls still long for Sophie, especially Ruthie, who, as an adult, eventually begins exhibiting similar symptoms to her mother. In 2003, a family moves in to the villa next door, including a young girl named Annie. Perhaps seeing herself in this girl, the 40-year-old Ruthie, a gifted photographer in her own right, is inspired to transcend anything she’s ever created.

The grueling and fascinating process of photographic development reads like its own sort of poetry in this gut-wrenching, achingly intimate look at grief and how closely art and life intertwine, for better or worse.

Pub Date: April 4, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-393-23976-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.