A trifle that at times has trouble filling its own pages and is often too coy for its own good. Probably more fun for those...
The latest from Goncourt-winning Echenoz (also see p. 143), starts well but ends up wan and thin.
In his 50s, Max Delmarc is a classical pianist in Paris, where he has problems few enough to keep under control, especially with the help of his tough personal manager, Bernie. One problem is stage fright (Bernie at times pushes him onto the stage), another is love of alcohol (Bernie steers him clear of bars before performances), and a third is Max’s old yearning for Rose, his one true love, who, through a misunderstanding (not a believable one), got away and now seems lost to him forever—though he still follows women if a glimpse tells him they might be Rose. And then there’s a fourth problem, announced on page one: “He is going to die a violent death in twenty-two days . . . .” This problem, it turns out, isn’t only Max’s, but the reader’s too, since when he does get his death, things go a-wandering. You see, he’s not really dead, or, he is, but that only means he wakes up in a huge clinic, gets surgically repaired, then waits in luxury for a week while it’s decided whether he’ll go to a beautiful but boring park or to “the urban zone,” which is—right, back to Paris, but with orders not to pick up his previous career and after cosmetic surgery to change his looks. A few things happen: Max does go back to music, doesn’t still like alcohol, is visited by Béliard, who was in charge of him at the clinic and is now having an emotional breakdown. There’ll be a twist regarding Rose at end.
A trifle that at times has trouble filling its own pages and is often too coy for its own good. Probably more fun for those who don’t yet know that death doesn’t hurt and that God is a skinny guy named Lopez.Pub Date: April 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-56584-871-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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