SHYLOCK IS MY NAME

Name: SHYLOCK IS MY NAME
Author: Howard Jacobson
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4132-1

by Howard Jacobson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2016

The book is also full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised and spanked—comic patter that pales...

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A novelization of The Merchant of Venice set in contemporary England touches on foreskins, art collectors, athletes, and troublesome daughters.

This is Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson’s (J, 2014, etc.) contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which writers are asked to reimagine one of the plays. He opens in a cemetery where a wealthy Jewish art collector named Strulovitch is visiting his late mother and pondering the latest misadventure of his teenage daughter, Beatrice. Nearby, reading to his buried wife from Portnoy’s Complaint, stands Shylock, transported (by Tardis?) from a script written under Elizabeth I to pages in the reign of QE II. The father of the play’s rebellious Jessica agrees to be a houseguest of Strulovitch, which allows the men to wax angry and eloquent on obstreperous offspring, anti-Semitism, and, ultimately, what penalty one can exact from the randy Christian jock with whom Beatrice has run off. Playing Antonio and middleman between father and daughter is an obnoxious aesthete named D’Anton with whom Strulovitch has clashed over a Jewish art museum. D’Anton’s partner in crude anti-Semitism is an inane version of Portia as wealthy socialite with a TV show in which she serves food and renders Judge Judy–type dispute resolutions. The legal gotcha here is supplied by Shylock, as both adviser and doppelgänger to Strulovitch, who is pondering a different pound of flesh. The Merchant is well-suited to Jacobson, a Philip Roth–like British writer known for his sterling prose and Jewish themes. It’s hard to say whether his novel stands well on its own, as the play permeates it with quotes, characters, allusions, plot elements, and that touch of magical realism that imports every pound of Shylock in the fictional flesh.

The book is also full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised and spanked—comic patter that pales amid the fine, thoughtful talk when his two heroes hold forth in this uneven effort.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8041-4132-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS 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.