A slim little surprise of delightful whimsy: Umberto Eco would definitely approve.
Getting shipwrecked doesn’t have to be so bad.
Ten-year-old Jeanne and her older brother Thomas don’t get along, which isn’t much of a surprise. In fact, not much is a surprise as Orsenna (Love and Empire, 1991, etc.) begins here. Jeanne and Thomas seem just your average precocious and slightly pampered French children who happen to be on an ocean liner to America—until, that is, the liner sinks in a storm and the kids are swept up on a deserted shore. The first sign that something is out of the ordinary—that we’re not reading just the tale of two children surviving on a lonely island—comes when Thomas and Jeanne discover pages of a dictionary washing up on the beach (there was a Scrabble tournament on the boat), still impossibly legible after floating in the sea. Jeanne is delighted and starts snatching the pages up, thinking she’d like to cover her body in them: “They would have caressed and soothed me in the unobtrusive, slightly unsettling way that words have.” The island turns out hardly to be deserted. A kindly older man named Monsieur Henri swiftly appears and takes the little survivors on a tour of a place more than a little magical and quite definitely metaphoric. Here, words are free, not imprisoned by and always waiting on people. Instead, they’re living tribes that occasionally have dealings with each other, sometimes even getting married to words from different tribes. All this isn’t just fantasy and fun, since Orsenna has some grammar lessons to teach the young readers who are presumably his targeted audience. But in this tiny French bestseller (260,000 copies sold so far, we’re told), he imparts the lessons delightfully, making examples of things like the nouns and articles (they’re always together) who go shopping in stores run by adjectives, since the adjectives help the nouns and articles feel less cold and naked.
A slim little surprise of delightful whimsy: Umberto Eco would definitely approve.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8076-1531-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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