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THE CERTIFICATE

Name: THE CERTIFICATE
Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer
ISBN: 0-374-12029-3

by Isaac Bashevis Singer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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Aria on adolescence written in Singer's old age, set familiarly in the post-WW II Warsaw ghetto. Nobelist Singer was his own man, but his triumph here is much like Dostoyevsky's in his later years when he wrote A Raw Youth and tapped the mad feel of his teens, though it's also modeled on Knut Hamsun's Hunger, a more intense but less lively story than Singer's. Singer's hero is David Bendiner, 19, a penniless and starving writer whose only claim to fame is an unpublished manuscript, Spinoza and the Cabala. David's brother Isaac, five years older, already belongs to Warsaw's Writers Club and seems a portrait of Singer's older brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer. David has lost a teaching job in his small home village, where he trips over his fate on every page. A dealer in certificates for traveling to Palestine accepts David as a wonderful choice for marrying him off to Minna Ahronson, the 24-year-old daughter of a once wealthy bankrupt; she wants to follow her lover, the indescribably romantic Zbigniew Shapira, to Palestine. Britain allows married Poles to bring their wives into the new nation, where the brides are then divorced and go their own way. Getting the certificate means cutting through expensive red tape and hangs over much of the novel. Throughout, Singer writes in a strikingly flesh, direct manner that allows for songful translation: "Night had fallen and lights were shining on the sidewalks. Mannequins in the store windows were dressed in the latest fashions. The moon swam across the sky. The stars seemed to ignite over the tin rooftops." Underclothed and with holes in his shoes, the star-crossed David spends the winter largely in a frigid, dark room, trudges about meeting people in distress, tries to stay alive while making sense of an unfathomably hostile universe crisscrossed with stupefying laws, politics, philosophies, manifestos, and religions. Singer's farewell? A Chaplinesque one, done with gusto and panache.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-12029-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WRITINGS ON YIDDISH AND YIDDISHKAYT, THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945
by Isaac Bashevis Singer ; translated by David Stromberg ; edited by David Stromberg

- BOOK REVIEW
SIMPLE GIMPL
by Isaac Bashevis Singer ; translated by Isaac Bashevis Singer , Saul Bellow & David Stromberg ; illustrated by Liana Finck

- BOOK REVIEW
MORE STORIES FROM MY FATHER’S COURT
by Isaac Bashevis Singer & translated by Curt Leviant

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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.