Not quite as deep as it wants to be, but pensively sad in how sheltered it feels, like people crawling from a tomb.
Czech author Klíma (Lovers for a Day, 1999, etc.) returns with a tale about the emotionally lost in contemporary Prague: modern lives haunted by the history of Soviet incursion.
Kristýna is a middle-aged dentist in Prague; Jana is her wild daughter, experimenting with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll; and Jan is the boyish investigator who splits their ages and becomes Kristýna’s lover. Kristýna is haunted by the infidelities of her father, her ex-husband (now convalescing and a spouter of insane but enlightening philosophy when she visits), and eventually also of Jan, who can’t resist an old flame and hasn’t yet learned to lie about it. Kristýna and he struggle for love, but the country’s baggage is too much for them to bear. Jan is too young, Kristýna too old, and Jana too wild—eventually she gets gang-raped while on heroin and needs to be put into recovery programs. The adventures of the three reveal that even the emergence from Soviet repression into something closer to freedom comes with a set of conflicts and difficulties, and whether these characters will find redemption for themselves and forgiveness for each other will be the story’s final word on love in modern eastern Europe. Klíma’s writing here sometimes meanders aimlessly as alternating narrators describe and critique the world about them, but it’s hard to know whether the fault lies with the author or the unimaginative translation that comes with a significant UK bent. It’s slow-going at first, but eventually these lives come to have meaning and import, and the reader wants them to find what they are looking for. It’s never so moving as when Kristýna’s ex-husband finally dies: “His dead eyes seem to look straight at me. I really didn’t think I’d be the one to close his eyelids.”
Not quite as deep as it wants to be, but pensively sad in how sheltered it feels, like people crawling from a tomb.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1695-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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