A beautifully imagined and deeply moving portrayal of temporal and spiritual conflict and crisis, from the ever-improving Czech author of such compelling fictions as Love and Garbage (1991) and Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1995). Kl°ma's subject here is Reverend Daniel Vedra, a faithful minister to his varied congregation (which includes the prisoner he dutifully counsels) and a devoted husband and father to his family of four. But Daniel harbors a guilty secret: his ``inability to be intimate,'' to share his inmost feelings, with his plain, submissive second wife Hana; for, as Hana knows all too well, ``his heart belonged to the one who had died.'' Memories of his beautiful first wife Jitka, a cancer victim, indeed preclude Daniel's full involvement in the lives he pretends to share—until he is pursued by a seductive parishioner, a married woman resembling Jitka, and persuades himself that consenting to love is the greatest good he can do. Kl°ma examines this seemingly familiar story from a fascinating variety of perspectives, including Daniel's tortured diary entries and evasive exchanges of letters with correspondents and confidants past and present—and also focuses on Hana's quiet acceptance of her husband's distance as well as on her own reluctant (and innocent) friendship with Matou Volek, a gifted linguist scarred by a combative marriage and attracted by Hana's very placidity. What makes this novel so absorbing, and so painful, is Kl°ma's intense concentration on his characters' perturbed and perversely resourceful moral natures; their desperate self- justifying, and ultimate surrender to the consequences of their actions. A work of great analytical power that transforms discourse and thought into harrowing drama. Kl°ma's best yet.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8021-1625-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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