Not quite the comedy of errors it aspires to be but an intriguing portrait of Lebanese culture nonetheless.
An aspiring writer becomes embroiled in an international crime ring tucked inside Beirut’s publishing industry.
This seriocomic tale by veteran Lebanese novelist Douaihy (The American Quarter, 2017, etc.) centers on Farid, a young writer whose efforts to sell his work are rebuffed by a series of publishers. (“No one reads,” one tells him.) However, he gets his foot in the door at Karam Brothers Press, a century-old firm that offers him a job as a copy editor. Hoping for a break, he dutifully brings his notebook to the office every day—and the one night he leaves it there, the offices are visited by law enforcement and the notebook vanishes. Misunderstandings proceed to pile upon each other: The book is not in the hands of the police but the publisher’s flirtatious wife, Persephone, who’s so enchanted with the prose she has a single copy of the book printed on paper that Karam Brothers had been using to produce counterfeit Euros. Douaihy plainly enjoys tinkering with the themes of art vs. commerce that the plot sets up: Does writing have actual value in the world, he means to ask, and if so, how does it acquire it? There are dark-comedy, Kafkaesque scenes throughout—Farid’s opus perpetually slips from his possession, and he insists his work is poetry to the authorities “to diminish the value of his book.” But there’s a sense that the novel’s humor is underplayed by the author and perhaps weakened by the translation, which tends toward flat descriptions. Douaihy overstuffs the narrative with baroque details about the publisher’s history to suggest a century of criminality and duplicity. But in the book's finer moments, Farid’s anxiety shines through, and Douaihy writes beautifully about the particulars of Arabic grammar and calligraphy.
Not quite the comedy of errors it aspires to be but an intriguing portrait of Lebanese culture nonetheless.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62371-990-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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