Moving, descriptive, and seductive urban tales.
Brill’s promising debut collection of short stories enjoyably navigates the streets and the heart of the Hungarian capital.
All the central characters of these stories seek direction, including a widower who’s traveled to Budapest to learn to play jazz, a librarian who’s become disconnected from the world, and a secret policeman who struggles to comprehend post-communist Hungary. The ever present chaos of the capital’s traffic encircles them as they attempt to carve routes through their own lives. The opening, first-person story, “Taxi!,” is written with such honest fluidity that readers may be fooled into mistaking it for autobiography. In it, San Franciscan Allan Simmons is on a mission to rediscover life after the death of his spouse. He hopes to achieve this by learning to play jazz piano but finds difficulty integrating into a city where he speaks little of the language and struggles to bridge the cultural gap. By chance, he meets Tibor, a taxi driver and fellow jazz aficionado, which allows him to experience the true embrace of Hungarian hospitality. It’s by far the standout story of an emotionally insightful, rewarding collection. In the elegantly written, sad, and charming tale “Getting Lost,” Maria, a lonely librarian, is unnerved by the sudden arrival of a mysterious gentleman who courts her attention. “Bullies,” about Lsazlo Hajdu, an ice-cold former member of the secret police, recalls communist Hungary’s atmosphere of intimidation and suspicion and considers how such ideologies linger on in the present. The author captures the vibrant hum of the city and revels in playing the flâneur, keenly observing the populated streets with brio: “I walked down streets I had never been on before...through pretty little squares with children playing...past a music school and listened to the sound of violins filling the air.” Overall, the collection is stylistically reminiscent of Paul Auster’s short stories, and it’s a must for anyone interested in Budapest.
Moving, descriptive, and seductive urban tales.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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