Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.
Memories—elusive, shattered, or tormenting—are central to a tender story of unlikely love.
In his 15th novel, the prolific Jacobson (Pussy, 2017, etc.) considers the debilities of very old age in a shrewd, surprising tale centered on a feisty nonagenarian who wraps herself in boas and baubles and a reticent bachelor. “Memory is a sadist,” observes Mrs. Beryl Dusinbery, who styles herself the Princess, after Scheherazade, seductive teller of tales. But Beryl’s tales are fragmentary and vexing: Troubling memories rise unbidden while the pleasures of her erotic past swirl mistily. “In her heyday,” Jacobson’s wry narrator reports, “Beryl Dusinbery had been able to drive the thought of any other woman out of a man’s mind. It wasn’t infidelity she conjured, it was oblivion.” Now, though, oblivion threatens her, as she struggles to remember the details of her many lovers; mixes up the identities of her two grown sons and their offspring, none of whom interest her; and frustrates her two caregivers with capricious demands. At the age of 91, Shimi Carmelli, like the Princess, exudes old-world sophistication with his “air of elegant, international desolation” and refined wardrobe. Other than in his appearance, though, Carmelli stands in sharp contrast to the Princess: Formerly a seller of phrenology busts, he tells fortunes, reading cards at a local Chinese restaurant and at charity events attended by widows eager for new love. He has lived a circumscribed, solitary life, striving in every way “to remove the stain of common humanity from his person.” Unlike the Princess, Carmelli is beset by remembering. “I have selective morbid hyperthymesia,” he confesses, unable to forget anything, most notably a childhood transgression that has haunted his entire life. Jacobson treats with compassion the dilemma of old age, when the future seems to hold nothing more than “the same, unvarying story” and an inevitable diminishment; instead, he offers his brittle Princess and self-effacing fortuneteller a chance to discover deeply hidden capacities for kindness and caring and the inspiration, as the Princess puts it, to “risk another end.”
Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984824-21-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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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