Part realistic novel, part high-class soap opera, and absorbingly readable from first page to last.
The story of a French Everyman is told in this appealing 2004 novel, the first in English translation from a veteran journalist and fiction writer.
It traces 40-plus years in the life of its narrator-protagonist Paul Blick, whose experiences are paralleled with events in the world outside him and particularly the body politic, as Dubois sets them in the contexts of presidential administrations, beginning with Charles de Gaulle and concluding with Jacques Chirac. The source of Paul’s emotional coolness is convincingly located in such early traumas as the death of his older brother from peritonitis and the callous condescension of his wealthy paternal grandmother toward his mother’s humbler family. Thus are rebellious “leftist” impulses implanted in him, and we observe their reappearances throughout his youth at the time of the late-1960s student riots, rapidly truncated military service and (frequently hilarious) couplings with women who undertake to educate him sexually. After breaking up with “perfect” girlfriend Marie and while drifting through a time of “profound upheaval in the relationship between men and women”—the Sexual Revolution, n’est-ce pas?—Paul settles on rich, beautiful Anna Villandreux, herself a successful businesswoman. “Capitulating” to the bourgeois convention of marriage when she becomes pregnant, Paul weds this formidable Aphrodite, fathers two children and passively tolerates Anna’s “independence.” Reluctant to resume an abandoned teaching career, he works as a reporter for the magazine Sports Illustrés, owned by Anna’s father, before discovering the passion for photography that makes him rich when, now a “cine-ethnographer” who produces a lavishly beautiful volume, Trees of France, he seems at last a success. But adultery, midlife crisis, parents’ deaths and his daughter’s plunge into irreversible depression exact their toll—and Paul, indeed a microcosm of the world around him, retreats to become another Candide, patiently, stoically, tending his garden.
Part realistic novel, part high-class soap opera, and absorbingly readable from first page to last.Pub Date: July 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26287-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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