An author respected throughout Europe should reach a wider American readership with this subversive novel.
Kadare (Twilight of the Eastern Gods, 2015, etc.) subverts the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a parable of totalitarianism.
The prizewinning novelist published this in his native Albania in 2009 and set it within “the dictatorship of the proletariat” that ruled his homeland for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The protagonist is a playwright who has been summoned for questioning by the Party Committee. He figures his newest work has fallen under scrutiny by investigators, who would be “looking for hostile catchphrases, counting the number of lines given to negative characters as against positive ones, looking at the fingerprints on the manuscript to find out if anyone suspicious had read it.” Instead, it seems, the issue at hand is an entirely different matter: a young woman has committed suicide, and in her hands was a book the writer had inscribed to her. He tells the committee he had never met her but had inscribed the book at a reading, at the request of another young woman, with whom he had proceeded into a tumultuous relationship. The playwright had suspected that this woman might be a spy for the government, and now he becomes increasingly concerned about his suspected involvement in the death of a woman he never met. The novel spirals deeper into surreal mystery as it explores the relationship between the two women, the impetus for the suicide, and the impact of the investigation on a play the protagonist is in the process of writing. “Better if you don’t know,” an investigator responds when the playwright asks of the circumstances surrounding the suicide. In his obsessive reflections, the playwright somehow becomes Orpheus, whose artistry can bring his wife back from the dead, but only if he keeps from looking at her as he leads her out of Hades. Myth and dream, memory and repression, all converge as the novel illuminates the essence of art in totalitarian Albania.
An author respected throughout Europe should reach a wider American readership with this subversive novel.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61902-916-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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