Closer in tone to François Traffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player or a Tom Waits song/story than an airport mystery novel.
One of Norway’s most famous writers investigates a strange series of fires not by examining the ashes, but by looking in the mirror.
This is not a crime novel. Except for being labeled a novel, it’s not even clear that this ambitious experiment by European best-seller Heivoll qualifies as anything less than the purest metafiction. The author treats his subject (a series of fires started by a serial arsonist in rural Norway in the 1970s) as a highly complex meditation on the human condition and our collective predisposition to insanity. In fact, Heivoll has created himself as a character, letting himself play the narrator, a successful modern-day writer who was born just before the first blaze. At an Italian literary festival, this character, long estranged from his homeland, falls ill, and his fevered mind transforms the audience into the dead of Finsland, his hometown. And so, Heivoll the narrator launches into the work of exploring those frightening days and nights of fiery destruction. Other segments are sickeningly frightening descriptions of the fires themselves: “The whole room was ablaze,” Heivoll writes in his first chapter. “The floor, the walls, the ceiling; the flames were licking upwards and wailing like a large wounded animal.” Other times, the narrator poetically imagines the firestarter at his work: “He tiptoed in, went to the bathroom and washed, stood for a moment studying some cuts and grazes to his forehead; his fingers still smelled faintly of petrol. His eyes were radiant and the tiredness was gone. There was grass in his hair. He shut his eyes and saw the swallows circling in the smoke under the roof.” It’s revealed early on that the narrator is well-acquainted with the real identity of the madman; he’s just more interested in the question “why?” than whodunit.
Closer in tone to François Traffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player or a Tom Waits song/story than an airport mystery novel.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-661-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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