Winner of the Whitbread Award when it was first published, this is a buoyant collection that’s not just for Gardam...
Two boys from different social classes become friends for life; their families follow suit.
These linked stories from 1981 join last year’s reissue of A Long Way From Verona; both predate by many years the English author’s acclaimed Old Filth trilogy. Up in Westmorland, in England’s far north, farmers have worked the land for hundreds of years. By the 1970s they have started summer rentals for “incomers.” So the Batemans from London rent from the Teesdales. Things start badly. Mr. Bateman is a journalist who needs peace and quiet; the racket of harvest time almost drives him back to London. The mothers save the day, with behind-the-scenes help from their sons: Bell Teesdale, who’s 8, and Harry Bateman, a good bit younger. The kids hit it off from the get-go. Harry becomes so fluent in the local dialect that Bell teasingly reproves him, “Speak right, can’t yer. You’ll finish up a savage.” He mentors little Harry, showing him a secret opening to an abandoned silver mine, where a rock fall traps them. The lads get trapped again in a huge snowstorm, and when Harry begs Bell to save them, the older boy, in an echo of A.A. Milne, “felt very young indeed.” Familiar childhood escapades, yes, but Gardam makes them glow by seeing them through a child’s eyes, as she did in Verona. She gives weight to the tall tales and ghost stories of the region but is not above tweaking them mischievously. Only in the last story (“Tomorrow’s Arrangements”) does she fumble. A distant relative, a smooth operator, arrives from Brazil to lay claim to the farmhouse the Batemans still rent in 1999; it’s an improbable, large-scale development in a work whose success is tied to the small-scale.
Winner of the Whitbread Award when it was first published, this is a buoyant collection that’s not just for Gardam completists.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60945-246-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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