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DIVORCE IS IN THE AIR

Name: DIVORCE IS IN THE AIR
Author: Gonzalo Torné
ISBN: 978-0-385-35402-8

by Gonzalo Torné ; translated by Megan McDowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2016

This novel should spark interest in Torné's previous two and anticipation for what’s to come.

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Nothing really happens outside the protagonist's head in this book, but the author's virtuosic command of voice sustains the narrative momentum.

This English-language debut by a young Spanish novelist could have been titled Joan-Marc’s Complaint, though the narrator doesn’t share the masturbatory obsession of Philip Roth’s hero. Yet he spews at length about his predicament in a soliloquy that extends past 300 pages and doesn’t pause for chapter breaks or have extra spaces to separate one section from the next. He is savagely funny, sometimes intentionally but often not, and his faith in “the healing power of humor” does not lead to the solution he desires. But what does he desire? And who is he? What is plain from the outset is that the narrator’s opinion of himself differs sharply from that of everyone else who enters his consciousness. The setup is that the narrator and his wife have come to a health spa at her instigation in order to heal their marriage. Accompanying them are her parents and a young boy, who must be the wife’s son but whose relationship to the narrator remains mysterious. The narration will return to the spa from time to time, but the scope of memory widens as the protagonist reveals that he is writing (or speaking) to his second wife about his marriage to his first wife and how the two were very different but ended much the same way. Why? “It’s the story of my life,” he says. “Neither of you could ever recognize my obvious merits.” To the contrary, one or both of his wives and the sister who despises him will, over the course of his tale, call him a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a hypochondriac, a man who wants others to support him, and “a collection of missing pieces.” As narrator and reader attempt to put that puzzle together, the narration becomes darker and deeper until the protagonist realizes just how alone he is and how old he has become. “Sometimes I have the feeling that no matter what I do, life is impossible,” he says. “That’s the only lesson to learn, the only one we don’t want to learn.”

This novel should spark interest in Torné's previous two and anticipation for what’s to come.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-385-35402-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.